Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built website could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the look of your web site is very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your prospective buyer sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the key design problems that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Issues

Common design problems that can impact your potential customer’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color schemes you select will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain old ugly visual elements can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful guiding features like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential business opportunities.

Website Functionality Problems

Some common functionality issues can include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in any website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working all the time. In some cases, these problems may be caused by things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-designed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are just some of the more common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your visitors 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. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current customers. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Features – Customers want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that point to your product pages by inserting eye-popping product pictures with well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another aspect that helps users want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let them\visitors 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 … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential clients that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing clients too.

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

First, understand that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires extensive web development.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Customizable Web Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you immediately modify the look and feel of your site without touching the site’s content and modifying any core software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or can be bought for a relatively small cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

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

Earlier in this article we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could cost you customers.

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

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

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 your website visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. 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 provide them with a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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