Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-constructed web site can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, the way your web site looks can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective buyers see and this could influence their decision to use your services.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse a web site first before buying products in-store or online.

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

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

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

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

Site Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can influence a user’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the color schemes you select will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily turn users away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur business losses.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues can include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are working all the time. In some cases, these issues may be related to things like your 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 site offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

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

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

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your site visitors 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current customers. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Visitors stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with eye-popping images alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help 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 to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to browse quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure 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 that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site 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 website is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of existing clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires a lot of web code modification.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently share more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to easily customize the look of your entire site without affecting the website’s content or modifying the core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable features for changing the design on your website such as the color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier in this article we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your website like links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are 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 site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, complete their transactions with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Expand Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you provide website visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow site users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep them returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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