Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-constructed web site? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed website could lose you prospective buyers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design matters, the way your website looks can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this can affect their decision to purchase from you.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website first before buying products in-store or online.

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

What your prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Design Issues

Common web design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the color schemes you decide on will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your content is arranged can affect the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience significant loss of customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems could be related to 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 fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed 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 to sharing their dissatisfaction across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical issues that can cause a disappointing user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing customers. Having features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where your content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Features – Customers stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that lead to your product pages by inserting great images beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as features that let users comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC 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 web site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also some of existing clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code writing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we strongly recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently provide more posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you easily customize the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or can be bought relatively cheaply, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing design settings on your site like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier in this article we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up costing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a WP plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP 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 shopping cart, apply discount codes, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins designed for WordPress that you can install on your site free of charge, or that you can purchase quite cheaply and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you give your web users a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow website visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

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

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results 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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