Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-designed website can lose you many new customers.

In a world where looks matter, how your website looks can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this can affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse a website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What your visitors 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 affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some key design issues that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Problems

Some common design issues that can influence your prospect’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the palettes you want to use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily turn users away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other assistive elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, 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 lose customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems can include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable for a website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your web presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working all the time. Sometimes, these issues are related to external things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers 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 users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment on social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are just some of the more common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to find. Your potential customers 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 users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which direct customers to your product pages with great images alongside well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps customers decide to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them to 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 … You also want visitors 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.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if the work requires extensive code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing site, then we strongly recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you quickly modify the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WP themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new features or new functionality.

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like to integrate with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress site owners that can be downloaded for free, or can be purchased for a relatively small cost and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Extend Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you provide your visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and better user experience.

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

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