Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed web site could lose you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design is becoming more important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective client sees and this can affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how most people research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s website first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your site:

Site Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can impact your visitor’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the palettes you use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can have an impact effect on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems could be related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users certain features, then make sure that these 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 features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, complete their purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their disappointment on social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are just some of the most common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your site 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. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing clients also. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations beside well-crafted 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.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, like features that let them\visitors comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you currently have an existing website with design problems that may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of code writing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to instantly customize the look of your entire website without affecting the site’s content and changing any of the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your website’s design like color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives users expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your site such as links not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire site is 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 turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress site owners that you can install on your site and are freely available, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Features

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep them coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these prospective customers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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