Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the way your website looks can be very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your potential customer sees and this could affect their decision to use your services.

People are turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse a site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your website appear to other people? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your site:

Website Design Problems

Some of the most common design problems that can influence your potential customer’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you choose will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can have an impact impact on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful assistive features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur significant business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality issues can include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical issues that can create a bad user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal 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 web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients too. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Website – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages by inserting great graphics with well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps users want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as allowing them 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 … You also want visitors to move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute 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 serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently publish more 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 web site design template systems that let you completely change the look of your site without touching the website’s content or changing any of the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings of your site such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could lose you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole web 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!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

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

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins Enhance Your Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Interactive 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 needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep users returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and better website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

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