Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could cost you valuable business.

In a world where looks matter, the design of your website can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

People are turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will switch on our smart device and go visit someone’s web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your website appear to other people? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can influence your user’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the color combinations you select will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can turn prospects away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through 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 display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website reflects your business. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. In some cases, these issues could be caused by things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues get fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, 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 people’s mouths and lead to venting their frustrations in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some common issues that can cause a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), 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 also existing customers. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where your content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with professionally-taken photos or illustrations with well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them to leave comments, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often 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 you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and 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 prospective customers but also your existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on this site because you have an existing website with design problems that could be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires extensive code editing.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you easily customize the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

WordPress – Modular Features

Another great reason to build your site using the WP web site publishing software is that WordPress provides users with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited features or functionality.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up losing you potential clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that does what you want your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

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 on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can install on your website for free, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you give your visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep them returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them 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 please see our related posts section.

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