Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, how your web site looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a potential client sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

People are turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit a site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your website appear to online users? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Site Design Problems

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

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the color schemes you choose will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is structured can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur potential business losses.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality issues can include the following:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on a website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to external factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues get fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical problems that can create a poor user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal 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.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current customers too. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Website – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links which lead to product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations beside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, like features that let users 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 … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting 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 like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of current clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently share more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Instant Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you easily change the look of your website with just a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professional WP themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or they can be bought quite cheaply, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing your site’s design like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives users modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could lose you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature you would like integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that will help you get the job done.

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

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

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that you can install on your website free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Expand Your Site’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for website visitors.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow website users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, your potential clients will simply move on to another business with a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WordPress CMS software please see other posts we have published on this site.

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