Are you losing business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, how your web site looks is very important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse someone’s site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to online users? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Design Issues

Some common design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential customers.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable on any website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your online presence reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working all the time. In some cases, these problems could be related to external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete their orders with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-built website is 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 networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Here are some of the most common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients also. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Website – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with eye-popping graphics with well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps customers decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – 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 visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, be aware that getting issues fixed on an existing website 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 code writing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we highly suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you immediately modify the look and feel of your website without touching the website’s content or modifying any underlying software.

There are thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your site like the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress web content management platform is that WordPress provides you with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website 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 goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, your prospective clients will simply move on to another business with a better website and user experience.

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

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