Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, the way your website looks is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may switch on our smart phone and go visit somebody’s site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web site appear to others? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Design Problems

Common design problems that can affect your visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the palettes you use will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain old ugly images can turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is 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 display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website reflects your business. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. In some cases, problems are related to external things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues get corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where customers suffer the most because of a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are some of the more common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and easy to navigate. 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 with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), 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 customers but existing clients as well. Things such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as the ability 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 visitors to move 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 ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site 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 website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if it requires extensive code editing.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to quickly change the look and feel of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

Earlier in this article we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you want integrated with your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want your site to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site such as links not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

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

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress users that you can install on your website for free, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improving Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you give your customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them returning to your website.

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

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

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