Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website can cost you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, how your website looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your prospective customers see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Web Site Design Issues

Common web design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the color combinations you use will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain old ugly images can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur significant loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues can include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable for a website, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working all the time. In some cases, these problems may be caused by factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems get corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current clients. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Features – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting great product images with well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as the ability to comment on, 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 navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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 built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also some of existing clients too.

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

First, understand that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires changing a lot of code.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Site Design

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

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing your website’s design such as the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WordPress – Modular Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this article we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like to integrate with your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want your website to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected with your site like links not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress users that you can download and install on your website free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Expand Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web 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 web visitors.

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 with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, your potential buyers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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