Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built website can lose you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, how your website looks can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may turn to our smart device and go browse somebody’s site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your 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 web site:

Web Site Design Problems

Common design issues that can influence your user’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect 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 ensure that the color schemes you want to use will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain ugly images can easily turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur significant business losses.

Website Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems 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 images are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems may be related to factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, 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 discounts, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are just some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current clients. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content can be easily found will help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Customers want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct customers to product pages with great photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as 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 within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident 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 pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires extensive coding.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you completely customize the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the site’s content or changing the core software.

There are literally thousands of professional themes created for WordPress users available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or can be bought for a relatively reasonable price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design such as color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could end up costing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a plugin that does what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website such as links not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need 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 and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins that you can install on your website at $0 cost, or are relatively cheap to purchase, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for customers.

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 with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep visitors returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these potential clients will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better website experience.

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

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