Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-constructed web site could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, the design of your website can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit a site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design issues that can affect your website:

Website Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can affect a potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the color combinations you decide on will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily turn prospects away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can have a significant impact in how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur business losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, these problems are related to factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain functionalities, 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 choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction across social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your potential customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing customers. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages with professionally-taken images next to well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps customers decide to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, like features that let them\visitors 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 … You also want visitors to browse quickly around your site and access your information 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 most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived found this site because you currently have an existing site with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if the work requires extensive coding.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we strongly suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to instantly modify the look of your site without touching the website’s content or changing any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WP themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing the design on your site such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides you with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire website is 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your website at no cost, or that you can purchase relatively inexpensively and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

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

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you give your visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will simply move on to another business with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WordPress web content publishing software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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