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

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit somebody’s web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your web presence appear to online users? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Web Design Issues

Common design problems that can influence your visitor’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the color combinations you want to use will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly images can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can have an impact impact in how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As online information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems can include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. In some cases, these issues could be related to external factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

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

Some of the more common problems that can create a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your web visitors 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. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current customers. Having features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct users to your product pages with great photos or illustrations and well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let them\visitors 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 users to browse quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of web development.

If you are considering getting a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we highly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Customizable Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you instantly customize the look and feel of your website without touching the website’s content and changing any of the core software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes designed for WordPress users available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing the design on your website like color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

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

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

Earlier in this post we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could end up losing you prospective customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need integrated into your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues 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 plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter discounts, complete their transactions using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these prospective buyers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using the WP software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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