Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-constructed web site can lose you many new customers.

In a world where looks matter, the design of your website can be very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s web site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Site Design Problems

Common design problems that can affect a potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the color schemes you use will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated and just plain old ugly images can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, 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 may lose business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems may be caused by external factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Some of the most common issues that can lead to a poor user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current customers also. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Features – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations with well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, like features that let them\visitors 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 navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site 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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires a lot of code writing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish more posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress site publishing platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to instantly customize the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes built for WordPress users available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing the design of your website such as the color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this article we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can lose you money.

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

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, use discounts, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress that you can install on your site at $0 cost, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Improve Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich 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 rich user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

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

Hopefully, this information has given you 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 the WP website publishing software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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