Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site could lose you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, how your website looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a prospective clients see and this could affect their decision to buy your products or use your services.

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may turn to our smart phone and go visit someone’s site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What web 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 things than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can impact your user’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the color combinations you want to use will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems can include the following:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to external factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, complete their transactions with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer the most due to a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some of the most common issues that can lead to a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing customers. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links that direct users to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations and well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like 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 … You also want users to move quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization 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 comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors 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 and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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 serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires editing code.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you immediately modify the look and feel of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress users available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or they can be bought for a relatively reasonable price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WP Plugins – Modular Expansion

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

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could cost you prospective clients.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you need to add to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, complete their purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of great plugins that you can install on your site at $0 cost, or that are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Website 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 visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow site visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this article 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 or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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