Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-designed website could end up costing you potential new customers and cause more turmoil than you can handle.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit a web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

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

What your prospective buyers 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’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Web Design Issues

Common web design issues that can affect your visitor’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you select will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is arranged can have a significant impact in how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience business losses.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues can include some following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your web presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems could be related to external things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use coupons, complete their purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations on social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective clients 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 content to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current clients also. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content can be easily found will provide users with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Customers want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means aiming for 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 by inserting great photos or illustrations beside well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as the ability 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 users to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if the work requires extensive web coding.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we highly recommend that you consider using the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you instantly change the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the site’s content or changing any core software functionality.

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

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings on your site like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

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

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

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that will get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will 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 goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress site owners that you can download and easily install on your website at no cost, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow web users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep visitors coming back to your site.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WP software please see our related posts section.

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