Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed web site can lose you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, the way your web site looks is very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective customers see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse a website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some of the main design issues that can affect your site:

Web Design Problems

Common web design problems that can affect your potential customer’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color combinations you choose will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain ugly images can easily turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your web presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these problems are caused by external factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues repaired immediately.
• 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 on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction across social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some of the most common issues that can cause a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to find. 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current clients as well. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links which direct users to your product pages with great product pictures alongside well-written descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as the ability to 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable 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 compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if the work requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing site, then we strongly suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to easily customize the look of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or they can be bought relatively inexpensively, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing the design on your website like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives site owners scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up losing you potential clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like integrated into your site, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform 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 customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded for free, 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 WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow website users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

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 using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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