Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site could end up losing you potential new clients and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can be very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will typically switch on our mobile phone and go browse someone’s site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to other people? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to engage with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Website Design Problems

Common web design issues that can influence your potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the palettes you select will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can have an impact impact in how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, 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 remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific functionality, 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 visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. 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 information.
• Organized – If your site content 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 search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found will provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations and well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another area that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to comment on, 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 browse quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – 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 prospective customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also your current clients too.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires a lot of web code writing.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more information about 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 Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to immediately change the look and feel of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, 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.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WordPress web site management platform is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site 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 in your site, just install a plugin that will do what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your site like links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole web site has gone 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 site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress 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, apply discount codes, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that you can download and install on your site at $0 cost, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, 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 very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website or user experience.

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

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