Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed web site could lose you prospective customers and important sales.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your web site looks can be important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your visitors see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically switch to our smart phone and go visit somebody’s site before making our next move.

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

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

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the main design issues that can affect your site:

Website Design Issues

Common design problems that can affect your visitor’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the color schemes you use will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is arranged can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Some common functionality problems include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. In some cases, these issues are related to things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their disappointment across social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy 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 content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing customers. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content can be easily found can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Site – Customers want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that lead to your product pages by inserting eye-catching graphics and well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps users decide to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let them\visitors 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 within your website and access your information 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 ensure that users feel comfortable 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 site includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing site with design problems that you feel may be affecting your business?

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

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide 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 choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you immediately customize the look of your site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing the design of your site like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

WordPress Plugins – Modular 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.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up losing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you want integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you want done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins that you can download and install on your website at no cost, or that are relatively cheap to buy and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you provide site visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow website users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better website experience.

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

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