Are you losing business because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed website can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where appearances matter, the look of your website can be important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a visitor sees and this could affect their decision to do business with you.

People are turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s site first before buying something in-store or online.

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

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

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Problems

Common design problems that can influence your user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color schemes you use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated or just plain old ugly graphic elements can easily turn users away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can have a significant impact in how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur loss of customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues can include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working all the time. Sometimes, these issues could be related to factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply coupons, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are just some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your 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 information 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 cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing clients. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Website – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct customers to product pages by inserting beautiful product images and well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps users want to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, like allowing them to 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, 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 isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if what needs doing requires modifying code extensively.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you quickly customize the look of your site without affecting the site’s content or modifying the underlying software.

There are thousands of professional WordPress themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new features or new functionality.

Earlier in this post we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality you want to add to your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need done.

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

Want a plugin that will transform your site 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 select and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can download and easily install on your website free of charge, or can be purchased quite cheaply, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improve Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced Website 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 visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them returning for more.

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

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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