Are you losing business because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site can cost you many new customers.

In a world where first impressions matter, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective buyers see and this can influence their decision to purchase from you.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit somebody’s web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

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

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design issues that can affect your site:

Site Design Problems

Common design problems that can impact a visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color combinations you use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain old ugly graphic elements can easily turn prospects off your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can have an impact impact on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur significant business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in a website, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are related to external factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all problems get corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer the most due to a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your potential buyers 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 information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing clients too. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Site – Users want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting great product pictures alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as the ability to 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 … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

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

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

First, understand that getting problems addressed on an existing website can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires extensive coding.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress web content management platform on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that allow you to easily change the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes designed for WordPress available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or they can be purchased quite cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing the design of your site like the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost 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 could end up costing you potential buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site like links not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

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

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you give your visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep visitors returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and 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 expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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