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

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can affect the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this can affect their decision to buy your products or use your services.

We typically do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably jump online and go browse a website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your web site appear to them? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What your 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 things than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Problems

Some common design issues that can influence a user’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you select will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful assistive elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these issues are caused by external things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, complete their purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their disappointment on social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Here are some of the most common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing customers also. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which lead to your product pages with professionally-taken photos or illustrations with well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps users want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like 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 users to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires extensive code modification.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of 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 – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to immediately customize the look and feel of your site without touching the website’s content and changing any core software.

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

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing design settings on your site like color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress content management platform is that WordPress provides users with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up costing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a plugin that gets things done.

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

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of great WP plugins that you can install on your site for free, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced 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 site users.

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

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

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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