Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-built web site could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, how your website looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their decision to use your services.

We mostly do it online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit a website before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Common design problems that can affect a user’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can impact on 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 palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you use will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can easily turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can have a significant impact in the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your web presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, complete their transactions with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer most because of a poorly-designed site is in the realm of 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 ….

Here are some of the more common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your visitors 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 information.
• Organization – 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. Having features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with eye-popping product images next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let them\visitors 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 navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web 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 of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also current clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires editing code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you easily customize the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be purchased for a relatively small cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your website like the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can end up costing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your website free of charge, or you can purchase quite inexpensively and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Enhancing Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these prospective buyers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

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

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