Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could end up costing you potential new clients and a lot of money.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, how your website looks can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is the first thing that a prospective buyers see and this could influence their decision to purchase from you.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to online users? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

What customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Common web design problems that can affect your potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the colors you choose will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can have a significant impact on how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Some common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your company. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems could be caused by things like your 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 immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Common issues that can create a disappointing user experience can include:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things 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 users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also existing clients. Having features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links that lead to your product pages by inserting eye-popping photos or illustrations beside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as the ability to leave comments, 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 move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires editing web code extensively.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing site, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you immediately customize the look of your entire website with only a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free, or they can be bought for a relatively reasonable price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings like color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited features.

Earlier in this post we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can lose you potential customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you want to integrate into your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you want done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website like links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need 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 inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins that you can download and easily install on your site at no cost, or can be purchased for a relatively small cost, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your customers.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep them coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, they will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using the WP CMS platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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