Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-designed web site could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s web site before making our next move.

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

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your site:

Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can affect a potential customer’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are structured can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues can include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in any website, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these problems are related to external factors such as your web 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 as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your prospective buyers 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current clients. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which direct visitors to product pages with eye-popping photos or illustrations and well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident 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 such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also existing customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires editing code extensively.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you instantly change the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content or modifying any core site functionality.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design such as the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides site owners with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WP plugin that gets the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins created for WordPress that you can download and install on your site and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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