Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where looks matter, the look of your web site can be 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 research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can affect a prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is arranged can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some common functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these issues could be caused by factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed web 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 them to share their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. 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 information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing clients. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken graphics and well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps users want to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as the ability to 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 users to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish 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 seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

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

There are thousands of professional WP themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, 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 helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP website publishing software is that WordPress provides website owners with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that you would like to add to your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole 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!

Need 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 plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins built for WordPress that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or that are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you give your site users a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and plugins that allow website users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep people coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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