Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-constructed website could cost you potential new clients and cause more problems than you can handle.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design is very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will typically jump online and go visit somebody’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your website appear to other people? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What customers 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 things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your web site:

Site Design Issues

Some common web design problems that can impact your visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the colors you select will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old ugly visual elements can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can have an impact impact in how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As online information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential customers.

Functionality Problems

Some common functionality issues may include some following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these issues are related to factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that all problems get repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain features and 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 users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Common problems that can lead to a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your prospective customers 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 files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current customers too. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content can be easily found can provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which direct users to your product pages with professionally-taken images with well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let them\visitors leave comments, 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 users to browse quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization 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 potential buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also your existing clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting web code.

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Instant Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you completely change the look of your entire site without affecting the site’s content and changing any underlying software.

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

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design such as the color, elements like menus and headers, 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 to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using the WP web content publishing software is that WordPress gives you powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier in this article we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will help you get the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing 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 problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress users 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.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Expand Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

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