Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-built website can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design matters, how your website looks can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically turn to our smart phone and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

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

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your website:

Site Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can impact your visitor’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the colors you select will display correctly across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience potential business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working all the time. In some cases, problems are related to things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these 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 choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and easy 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 files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current customers. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with beautiful product images and well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, like 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 … You also want users to browse quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most 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 your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and 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 site with design problems that could be affecting your business?

First, be aware 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 website you own, especially if it requires a lot of web development.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to easily customize the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your site’s design like color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new features.

Earlier in this article we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can lose you customers.

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

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can install on your site free of charge, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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