Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the design of your website can affect your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we still switch to our mobile device and go visit someone’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your digital presence appear to visitors? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately engage with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some key design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical design problems that can influence a user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly images can turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can have a significant effect on the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality problems may include some following:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. In some cases, problems may be related to things like your web 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 as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical problems that can lead to a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your 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. PDF files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing clients. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which direct customers to product pages with eye-catching images with well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage 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 … You also want users to move quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, understand that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires changing a lot of code.

If you are considering getting a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you completely change the look of your site without affecting the website’s content or modifying the core software.

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

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing design settings on your site like the color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Expansion

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

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this article we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can cost you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected with your site such as links not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discount codes, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can install on your website at no cost, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Website With WP Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep visitors coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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