Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could lose you many new customers.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that your web visitors see and this can influence their decision to do business with you.

People are turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go browse a web site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What your visitors 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 affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the key design issues that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Problems

Some of the most common web design problems that can influence your potential customer’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the color combinations you select will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

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

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for a website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these issues could be caused by external factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where prospective clients suffer the most due to a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are some of the more common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your site visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content can be easily found will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Customers stick around 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 website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links that point to product pages with great photos or illustrations and well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them 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 … Additionally, you want users to be able 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.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a 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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress website management platform on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to immediately modify the look and feel of your site without affecting the site’s content or changing any of the core software.

There are thousands of professional WP themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they can be bought for a relatively small cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your site such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress web site publishing platform is that WordPress gives users powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could lose you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your website such as links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 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 features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of great plugins for WordPress that you can download and install on your website at $0 cost, or are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Extend Your Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

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

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

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