Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, the look of your website can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

We typically do it mostly online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your website appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some key design issues that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical design problems that can impact your visitor’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the colors you use will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is arranged can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable in a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your web presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these problems could be related to factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that suffers the most due to a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment on social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical problems that can lead to a bad user experience can include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should not be kept in obscure corners. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing customers also. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with great graphics alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps visitors want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed 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 visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you have an existing site with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

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

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to easily modify the look and feel of your entire site without touching the site’s content and modifying any of the core software.

There are thousands of professional WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this article we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could cost you potential clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you want done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your website such as links not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell products 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, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins built for WordPress that can be downloaded at no cost, or that can be bought for a reasonable cost and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep people returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these potential customers will simply move on to another business with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, this information 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 the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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