Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-built web site could lose you valuable business.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, how your website looks can be important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this could influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse someone’s web site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

What your customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common design issues that can impact your user’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain ugly images can easily turn prospective clients away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your content is arranged can have a significant effect on how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As online information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur potential business losses.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, these issues may be related to things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, 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 web site provides visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your web 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. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing customers also. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with beautiful graphics alongside well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed 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 interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site 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 is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also your current customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires a lot of code writing.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to immediately customize the look of your entire website without touching the site’s content and modifying the underlying software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes built for WordPress site owners available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like the color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress gives website owners powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited extra features.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up costing you money.

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

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire website is 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!

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 and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be downloaded free of charge, or you can buy for a relatively inexpensive price, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and functional plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP website management platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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