Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website could lose you prospective new clients and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective client sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

We typically do things online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse someone’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to online users? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What prospective customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately engage with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Web Site Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the palettes you decide on will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can turn prospects off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur business losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these problems could be caused by factors 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 immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discount codes, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are just some of the more common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing customers as well. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that lead to your product pages with great photos or illustrations beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps users want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as features that let users leave comments, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to browse quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business 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 compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this site because you have an existing site with design issues that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires extensive coding.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that enable you to completely customize the look and feel of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing your website’s design such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features.

Earlier in this post we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up losing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WP plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discount coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that can be downloaded free of charge, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Enhance Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you provide your website visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow site users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep visitors returning again and again.

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

Hopefully, this post has given you 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 using the WP platform please see our related posts section.

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