Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-constructed website? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-designed website could lose you potential buyers and a lot of money.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may switch to our mobile phone and go visit a site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common design issues that can impact your user’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your 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 palettes to make sure that the palettes you select will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly visual elements can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is structured can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur significant loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working at all times. In some cases, these issues are related to things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides 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 customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, use discounts, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are some common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors 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 buyers but current clients as well. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with eye-popping product images beside well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code writing.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to 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 use WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to completely customize the look of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing design settings of your site like the color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

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

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

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins that you can download and easily install on your site free of charge, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Expand Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

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

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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