Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-built website can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the way your website looks can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a visitors see and this could affect their decision to do business with you.

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your web site appear to other people? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Issues

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

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience business losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues can include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems are caused by factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend 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, enter discount codes, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where prospective buyers suffer most due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your 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 information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing customers also. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Website – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting great product pictures next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like allowing them to leave comments, 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 move quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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 risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also some of current clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if it requires modifying code.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you instantly change the look and feel of your website without touching the website’s content or modifying any of the underlying software.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress users available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing design settings of your site such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Understanding Themes

Plugins – Powerful Features

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

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

Earlier in this article we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can end up costing you potential buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality you would like integrated with your site, just install a plugin that does what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your website like links not working, videos not streaming, pictures 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 issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins designed for WordPress that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that you can purchase for a small price, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-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 website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep people coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business 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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