Are you losing business because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site can end up costing you potential new customers and cause more havoc than you can handle.

In a world where appearances matter, the look of your web site can affect the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

We do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Site Design Issues

Some of the most common web design problems that can affect a prospect’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can impact on 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 palettes to ensure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems may include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your web presence reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems may be caused by things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all issues get fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical problems that can create a disappointing user experience can include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. 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 information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current customers as well. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that lead to product pages with eye-catching photos or illustrations alongside well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to browse quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a business information 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 results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also your existing clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires editing web code.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to easily customize the look and feel of your entire site without touching the site’s content or modifying any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be purchased for a relatively reasonable cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

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

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up losing you prospective buyers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a plugin that does what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole web site 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!

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 inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress site owners that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are relatively cheap to buy and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for web users.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow web users 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 rich user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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