Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built site? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed web site could end up costing you potential new customers and important sales.

In a world where first impressions matter, how your website looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We do it online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will probably jump online and go visit a website before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to them? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Design Problems

Some of the most common design issues that can influence a user’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color combinations you select will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated or just plain ugly visual elements can turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is laid out can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur potential business losses.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable in any website, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to external things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction in social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can create a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current clients. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting great images alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as features that let them\visitors leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also some of current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on this website because you currently have an existing site with design problems that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if it requires modifying web code.

If you are considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you instantly customize the look of your site without affecting the website’s content and modifying any underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free, or they are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your site like color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To WP Themes

Plugins – Modular Features

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited extra features.

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up losing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your site like links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins created for WordPress that you can install on your website and are freely available, or that are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your customers.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these potential buyers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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