Are you losing business because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed web site can end up costing you potential customers and important sales.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can be very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a prospective clients see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we may turn on our mobile device and go browse someone’s web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your website appear to online users? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s review some of the main design problems that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical design problems that can impact your visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the color schemes you select will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful assistive features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As online information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose opportunities.

Website Functionality Issues

Some common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, these problems are caused by factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discounts, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction on social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Common issues that can create a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your potential customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing customers as well. Having features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting eye-popping images next to well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let users leave comments, 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 users to navigate quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most 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 compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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 risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you currently have an existing website with design issues that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires editing code.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you completely customize the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes designed for WordPress available that you can download and install on your website. Many of these are either free, or they can be purchased relatively cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Basic Guide To WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress web content publishing platform is that WordPress gives you expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up costing you prospective customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite 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.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discounts, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of great plugins for WordPress that you can download and easily install on your site free of charge, or that you can buy for a relatively reasonable cost and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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