Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-built web site could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design is very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

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

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Design Problems

Common web design problems that can influence your visitor’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the color combinations you select will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other guiding elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable business opportunities.

Website Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working at all times. In some cases, problems could be related to things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer the most due to a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their frustrations in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some common issues that can create a disappointing user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your customers 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. PDF reports), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers too. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting eye-catching images next to well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as features that let users comment on, 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 around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential clients that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also some of current clients too.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code writing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide more information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to quickly customize the look of your site in minutes.

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

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, 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 themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you need integrated with your website, just install a plugin that will do what you want done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete their transactions using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that you can download and install on your site at no cost, or are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your visitors.

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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