Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-built website? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site can cost you valuable business.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can be important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can influence their decision to use your services.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will probably turn to our mobile device and go visit someone’s web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to them? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your website:

Website Design Problems

Common design problems that can impact your potential customer’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other orientation features like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems may include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on a website, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain functionalities, 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 features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that suffers most due to a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction in social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Your service information should not be kept in obscure corners. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. 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 web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients too. Having features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content can be easily found will provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct customers to your product pages with beautiful images next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps users decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – 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 web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires modifying code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently 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 seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that allow you to immediately change the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the site’s content or changing any of the core software.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings like color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP Themes – An Overview

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this post we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up costing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality you would like to add to your website, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you want your website to do.

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 are missing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues 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 business solution? 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 easily choose and add products to a cart, enter discounts, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that can be downloaded for free, or that are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Website With WP Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, now you have 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 WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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