Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, the way your web site looks can affect the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this could affect their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if it’s just doing preliminary research, we will switch on our mobile phone and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to visitors? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What prospects 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 affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your site:

Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can impact a visitor’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the palettes you select will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have an impact effect on how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience loss of customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on any website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working all the time. Sometimes, these problems may be related to factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where potential customers suffer the most due to a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. Your prospective buyers 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 files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing customers as well. Features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links which point to your product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations next to well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as features that let them\visitors leave comments, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable 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 like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of current clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing site with design issues that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if it requires writing code.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to easily customize the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content or changing any of the underlying site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or can be bought relatively inexpensively, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing the design on your website like the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress provides website owners with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that can be downloaded and are freely available, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow site users to contact, engage and interact 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 users returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you 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 the WordPress CMS platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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