Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed site? A poorly-constructed website can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where looks matter, the design of your web site can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What potential buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your website:

Web Design Problems

Common web design issues that can impact your user’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can turn users away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential customers.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. In some cases, problems could be caused by things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues are corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Here are some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing clients. Having features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting great graphics with well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps customers decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, like features that let users comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute 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 potential customers but also your current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to completely customize the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively cheap to buy, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing the design of your site like the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Features

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new features.

Earlier in this article we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature you would like to integrate with your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great WordPress plugins that you can install on your website and are freely available, or that can be bought for a relatively reasonable cost and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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