Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-constructed website could lose you potential new customers and a lot of money.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the design of your website is very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their decision to buy your products or use your services.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still turn on our mobile phone and go browse somebody’s site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

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

Web Design Problems

Typical design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the palettes you select will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated and just plain ugly graphic elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have an impact impact in the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems may be related to things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all problems get addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discount codes, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that suffers most because of a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment on social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Typical problems that can create a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to find. Your customers 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 information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing customers. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which direct visitors to product pages with great graphics with well-written descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps users want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, like allowing them to 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 move quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your existing clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you currently have an existing site with design problems that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires extensive coding.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more in-depth posts 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 consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you quickly modify the look of your entire site without touching the website’s content and modifying any core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing your website’s design like color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could lose you prospective buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole site 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 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 on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that you can download and install on your site free of charge, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your potential customers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have 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 the WP CMS platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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