Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site could end up costing you potential buyers and a lot of money.

In a world where attractive things matter, how your website looks can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

What your web visitors 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 affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Site Design Issues

Some common design issues that can impact your user’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you use will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain ugly images can turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is laid out can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality problems may include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are not acceptable for any website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. Sometimes, problems could be related to external things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues get addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter discounts, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction across social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to find. Your visitors 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 information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing customers. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting eye-catching graphics next to well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing site with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

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

If you are currently in the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish more articles about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress platform on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that enable you to completely modify the look of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or can be bought for a relatively small cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with customizable options for changing the design on your site like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

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

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like to add to your site, just install a plugin that will get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website like links not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need 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 products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

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

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. 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.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better 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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