Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your website looks is becoming more important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their decision to use your services.

We mostly do things online. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit a website before deciding what to do next.

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

What your potential clients see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately move forward with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

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

Website Design Problems

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

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the colors you select will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily turn prospects off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur potential loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems may include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your web presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are related to external factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discounts, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction on social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your web 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. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Things such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This means finding 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-popping graphics and well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps users decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let users comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often 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 your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate 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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are considering getting a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Instant Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you quickly modify the look of your site without touching the website’s content or modifying any of the underlying site functionality.

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

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing design settings of your site like color, elements like headers and footers, page 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.

Learn about themes here:

• WP Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this post we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could cost you customers.

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

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

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great WordPress plugins that can be downloaded at no cost, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Site With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

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