Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-designed site? A poorly-designed website can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is the first thing that a potential buyers see and this could affect their decision to do business with you.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse a web site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to online users? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Typical design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color schemes you decide on will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can easily turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are structured can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience significant business opportunity losses.

Website Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for any website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues could be related to external factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all problems get addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors certain functionality, 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 visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are just some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your product information should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing clients as well. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors stick around on 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 users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which point to product pages with beautiful images and well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content 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 visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute 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 risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also current clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires modifying web code extensively.

If you are researching the process of getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Instant Web Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you instantly customize the look of your site without touching the website’s content or modifying any underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes created for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

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

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Modular Features

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this article we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up costing you potential buyers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that you would like integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, 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!

Need a plugin that will turn 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 goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you give visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better 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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