Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-designed site? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-constructed website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design is very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse a website first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to other people? 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 website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Web Design Problems

Common design problems that can affect a visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive 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 color palettes you can use to ensure that the color schemes you decide on will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience potential business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, these issues are related to factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that all problems are corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want 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 cart, apply discount codes, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-constructed web 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 share their frustrations on social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to 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 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 website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current clients. Features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Website – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages by inserting eye-catching photos or illustrations with well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another aspect that helps users want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to browse quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also your existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you currently have an existing website with design problems that could be affecting your business?

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

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website built or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you quickly change the look of your entire site in minutes.

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

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, 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 works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP web site publishing software is that WordPress gives users modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up losing you potential clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole 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 take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins that you can download and easily install on your website free of charge, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-built 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 types of applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep visitors returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they 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 grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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