Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-constructed web site? No matter how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-designed website could end up losing you potential buyers and a lot of money.

In a world where attractive design sells, how your web site looks can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will switch on our mobile phone and go visit someone’s web site before deciding what to do next.

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

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can affect your potential customer’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your website’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 help ensure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential business opportunities.

Website Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent site errors are not acceptable in a website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these problems are related to things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues are addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer most because of a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Typical problems that can lead to a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. 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.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also existing clients. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken product images with well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as features that let users comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to browse quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as 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 contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are considering having a new website built or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you completely modify the look and feel of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WP themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be bought for a relatively small cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

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

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could lose you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you want integrated into your website, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your website like links not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole website 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 transform 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 features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of useful WP plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide your web users with a great user experience.

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

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

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

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