Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website can cost you prospective customers and a lot of money.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We typically do it mostly online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go visit a web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’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 where to go next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Website Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can affect a potential customer’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the colors you use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn visitors away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can affect the way users 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, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by 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 experience business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable for any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are related to factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer the most because of a poorly-designed website 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 to venting their frustrations across social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Typical issues that can cause a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your prospective customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers also. Things such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations with well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, 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 … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and 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 your existing clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you currently have an existing site with design issues that are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if it requires editing code extensively.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that allow you to completely change the look of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively cheap to buy, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing the design on your site like color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

WordPress Plugins – Modular Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress gives you powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you need to integrate with your website, just install a plugin that does what you want your website to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website like links not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems 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 inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, complete their transactions using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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