Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-designed web site can end up costing you prospective buyers and important sales.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design can affect the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could affect their decision to purchase.

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit a site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your website appear to others? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to engage with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Website Design Problems

Common design issues that can affect your potential customer’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the color schemes you choose will display correctly across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other assistive elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by external factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get issues corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. 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 files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current customers. Features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where your content can be easily found can provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with eye-catching graphics next to well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively 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 customers but also current customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires extensive web coding.

If you are considering getting a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you completely modify the look of your website without affecting the website’s content and modifying any of the core software.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be bought for a relatively inexpensive price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing the design of your website like color, template elements like headers and footers, page 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 helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up losing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you want to add to your site, just install a plugin that will do what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter discounts, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins designed for WordPress that you can install on your website at $0 cost, or that can be purchased for a reasonable price, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Site With WP Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide your visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow site users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep them returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your prospective customers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and better website experience.

Hopefully, this post 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 the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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