Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-constructed site? A poorly-designed website can end up costing you potential buyers and a lot of money.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this could affect their decision to buy your products or use your services.

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

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

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some of the key design issues that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Issues

Common design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the colors you decide on will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually boring, outdated and just plain old ugly images can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur significant business losses.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in any website, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems could be related to things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discounts, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your product information should be easy to find. Your prospective buyers 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 information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current clients also. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content can be easily found can help provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with eye-catching graphics next to well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps users want to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate 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.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

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

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

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires a lot of code writing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we highly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Customizable Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that allow you to completely change the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Features

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

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

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want your website to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or you can buy relatively cheaply and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins Enhance Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you give web visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow web users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

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

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

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