Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, how your website looks can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is the first thing that your prospective buyer sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still switch on our smart device and go visit somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web site appear to them? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design issues that can affect your site:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common web design problems that can affect a potential customer’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Poor color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the colors you want to use will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can significantly impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful assistive features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, problems are related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues are corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Some common problems that can create a poor user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing clients. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which direct visitors to product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics next to well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another area that helps customers want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to browse quickly through 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 most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code writing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth posts 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 use WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to quickly change the look of your site without touching the website’s content and modifying the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional WP themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing design settings on your site such as the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

WordPress – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress web content management software is that WordPress gives site owners scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could lose you potential buyers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you want to integrate into your website, just install a WP plugin that will get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site is 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!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, use coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or that can be purchased relatively inexpensively and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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