Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where first impressions matter, the design of your website can be important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may switch on our mobile device and go browse somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What 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 affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the palettes you select will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose business opportunities.

Website Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues can include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent errors are not acceptable in a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, problems may be related to external things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are some of the most common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing clients also. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, 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 visitors to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also current customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires editing web code.

If you are in the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to completely change the look of your entire website without touching the website’s content and changing the core software functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either free, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings of your website like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WordPress – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to choose the WP web content management platform is that WordPress provides you with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can end up costing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that you want to add to your website, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

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 plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your site and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Extend Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow web users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these prospective clients will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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