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

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your website can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still switch on our smart phone and go browse someone’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web site appear to them? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Problems

Common design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain old ugly graphic elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can significantly impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other assistive features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience significant loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues may include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. In some cases, these issues could be caused by things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, complete their transactions using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer the most because of 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 people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment across social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Typical issues that can lead to a poor user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your visitors 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. PDF reports), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing customers. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting beautiful graphics and well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps users decide to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires writing code.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WP Themes – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that allow you to instantly modify the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the website’s content or modifying any core software.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes built for WordPress users available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides you with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited features and functionality.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality you would like integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Website’s Features

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep people returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, your potential customers 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 get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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