Are you losing business because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-designed website can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the design of your website is becoming more important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective buyers see and this could affect their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit a web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

What potential buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Design Issues

Common web design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you decide on will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful orientation features like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, 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 lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Typical functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable for a website, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your web presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these issues are related to things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built website 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 sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your prospective customers 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. PDF price lists), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients too. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Visitors stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages by inserting great images beside well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like allowing them to leave comments, 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 visitors to move quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also your current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you 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 some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web coding.

If you are researching the process of having a new website built or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Instant Web Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your website’s design settings like the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Functionality

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

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

Earlier in this post we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up losing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying 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!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive 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 choose and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of useful plugins for WordPress users that can be easily downloaded for free, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Enhance Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow website visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep people coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, your potential buyers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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