Are you losing business because of poor web design? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-built website can end up losing you prospective new clients and cause more turmoil than you can imagine.

In a world where attractive design sells, the design of your web site can be very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a visitor sees and this could affect their decision to use your services.

We mostly do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can affect a visitor’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to the use of 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 palettes you choose will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Website Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, these problems could be related to external factors 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 all issues get repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer most because of a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are just some of the more common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current customers as well. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links that direct visitors to product pages with professionally-taken images and well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, like features that let users 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 be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, 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 risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also your existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if the work requires editing web code.

If you are researching the process of getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you easily customize the look and feel of your site without affecting the site’s content and changing the core software functionality.

There are thousands of professional WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be bought for a relatively reasonable price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings of your site like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Modular Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress content management software is that WordPress gives users expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that will help you get the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire site has gone 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 transform 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 products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, use discounts, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Enhance Your Website’s Capability

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you give your web users a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow site users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep them coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these prospective clients will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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