Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed web site? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-designed web site could lose you potential customers and cause more problems than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design matters, how your website looks can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a prospective buyer sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s website before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite them to enter 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 in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can impact your prospect’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Poor color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can easily turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other orientation elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur business opportunity losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these issues may be caused by things 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 issues are fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

Typical issues that can create a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing clients. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps customers want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like features that let them\visitors 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 … You also want visitors to move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial 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 site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also some of existing clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if the work requires extensive code modification.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more information 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:

Themes – Inexpensive Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you quickly modify the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional themes built for WordPress site owners available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WP content management software is that WordPress provides website owners with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

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

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you 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 on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or you can purchase quite cheaply and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of 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, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these potential buyers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this information 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 the WP software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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