Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-built website can cost you prospective customers and a lot of money.

In a world where beautiful design matters, how your website looks is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse someone’s web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to them? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious 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 is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design problems that can affect your site:

Site Design Issues

Common design problems that can impact a user’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the color combinations you use will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually boring, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable in any website, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems may be caused by external factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products 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, enter coupons, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your visitors 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 information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current customers also. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with eye-popping product images and well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, such as features that let users leave comments, 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 users to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that 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 web site includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing website with design issues that are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take some time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if the work requires modifying code extensively.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you easily change the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional WP themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that will help you get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

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 and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of great plugins that you can download and install on your website for free, or you can buy relatively cheaply and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Enhance Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

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

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, they will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and user experience.

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

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