Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built website could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where first impressions matter, the design of your website can play a significant role in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will typically switch to our smart device and go visit a web site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your website appear to others? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What potential buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Website Design Issues

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

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you decide on will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain hard to read text can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can affect the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally 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 may lose customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues can include some or all of the following:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working all the time. In some cases, these issues are caused by external things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your customers 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. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing customers too. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Website – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct visitors to your product pages by inserting eye-catching photos or illustrations with well-written descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps users decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to move quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable 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 compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we strongly suggest that you consider using the WordPress content management 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 some key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you instantly customize the look and feel of your website without touching the site’s content or modifying any core site functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are fully responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WordPress website publishing platform is that WordPress provides you with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can lose you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that you would like integrated with your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need your site to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole 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 let you turn your site 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 on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

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

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improve Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will 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 web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress website management software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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