Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed web site can end up costing you prospective new customers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where beautiful design matters, how your website looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a prospective clients see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

We typically do it online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to them? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

What your web visitors 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 influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Website Design Issues

Common web design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the colors you want to use will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can have a significant impact on the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful assistive features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. In some cases, these problems are related to external factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems get fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discounts, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

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

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. 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 files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current clients. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken product pictures next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed 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 comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company 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 statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also your current clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of web coding.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we strongly suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share more information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that allow you to easily customize the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing the design of your site like the color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

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

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

Earlier in this article we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can lose you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your website such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, complete their orders 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 that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap to purchase and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate 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 customers.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact 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 them returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make 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.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WP website management software please see our related posts section.

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