Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-designed site? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-constructed website can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can affect the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective client sees and this can affect their decision to purchase.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your digital presence appear to visitors? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Issues

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

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the colors you decide on will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful assistive features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues may be caused by external factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your service information should be easy to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no 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 information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients also. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which lead to product pages by inserting beautiful product images alongside well-written descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps customers decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like features that let users comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to move quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also your current customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting code.

If you are considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that allow you to immediately modify the look and feel of your entire website without touching the website’s content or modifying the underlying software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes created for WordPress users available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides site owners with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could cost you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you need to add to your site, just install a plugin that will get the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected with your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are 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 WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can download and install on your site and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap to purchase and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your website.

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

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using the WP CMS platform please see our related posts section.

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