Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-built web site can end up losing you prospective customers and cause more turmoil than you can imagine.

In a world where attractive design sells, the design of your web site is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we will turn on our smart device and go browse a web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

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

What prospective customers 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 factors than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Web Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color combinations you choose will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience potential business losses.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems may include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable in a website, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, these issues are caused by external things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain functionality, 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 users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discount coupons, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction on social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your potential clients 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 information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing customers too. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, like features that let them\visitors 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 users to move quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also your current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you have an existing site with design problems that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires changing a lot of code.

If you are considering having a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Flexible Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your site without touching the website’s content and changing any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing the design of your site such as the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose the WP website publishing platform is that WordPress provides you with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new features.

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could lose you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a plugin that will get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole 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 transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? 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 cart, enter discount coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these potential clients will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have 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 see our related posts section.

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