Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site could end up losing you potential new customers and important sales.

In a world where beautiful design matters, how your web site looks can be very important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective buyer sees and this could affect their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how most people research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s web site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

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

Site Design Issues

Some of the most common web design problems that can impact your user’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the color combinations you select will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can have an impact effect on the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on a website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, problems may be caused by factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete their transactions with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current clients. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where your content can be easily found provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means striking 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 great product pictures with well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as the ability 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 browse quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site 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 risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems addressed on an existing website can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to immediately customize the look of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings of your website like the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress – Powerful Features

Another great reason to build your site using the WP web site management platform is that WordPress provides site owners with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier we discussed issues 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 problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you want your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your site for free, or that can be purchased relatively cheaply, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Enhancing Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for site users.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

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

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using the WordPress web content management platform please see our related posts section.

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