Are you losing business because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-built website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the look of your web site is very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this can affect their decision to purchase.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s website before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What prospective buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site:

Website Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can impact your visitor’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color combinations you decide on will display correctly across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. In some cases, these issues may be related to things 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 problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific features and 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 visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, complete their purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that suffers most due to a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their disappointment across social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services 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. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current clients. Features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where your content can be easily found can provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires striking 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 beautiful graphics beside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, 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 navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business 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 of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more 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:

WP Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to easily change the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings of your website like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides site owners with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could lose you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you want done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your website such as links not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow site visitors 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 rich user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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