Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-constructed web site? A poorly-designed web site can lose you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your web site looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this could affect their decision to do business with you.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse a website first before buying something in-store or online.

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

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Common design problems that can influence a user’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working all the time. In some cases, problems could be related to external things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Some common problems that can create a disappointing user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should 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 what they are looking for 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 site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current clients as well. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where your content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Compelling Website – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that point to product pages by inserting eye-catching graphics alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like the ability to 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 visitors to move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

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 risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing customers too.

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

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

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you quickly customize the look of your entire website without affecting the website’s content or changing any of the underlying site functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either free, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings like color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, 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 ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature you need integrated with your website, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole site 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!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can install on your website free of charge, or that are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

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

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using the WordPress platform please see our related posts section.

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