Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site could lose you prospective buyers and cause more issues than you can handle.

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

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may turn on our smart phone and go browse somebody’s web site before making our next move.

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

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can influence your visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the colors you decide on will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is arranged can have an impact effect on the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality issues can include:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your web presence reflects your business. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working at all times. Sometimes, these issues are caused by factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that all problems are addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific features or functionalities, 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 features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Your service information should not be kept in obscure places. Your prospective customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current clients. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content is grouped or linked together can provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links which point to product pages with professionally-taken graphics beside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information 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 negatively impact your business results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on this site because you have an existing website with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you completely change the look and feel of your entire site with only a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, 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 ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress web content publishing platform is that WordPress provides website owners with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you need to add to your website, just install a WP plugin that does what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that you can download and easily install on your website for free, or that are relatively cheap to buy and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improving Your Web Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced Website 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 your web users.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep visitors returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. 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 or better user experience.

Hopefully, this information 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 software please see other posts we have published on this site.

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