Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website could end up costing you potential new customers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the look of your web site can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will turn to our smart phone and go visit someone’s web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Some common web design issues that can affect your user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the colors you want to use will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can have a significant impact in the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience business losses.

Functionality Issues

Some common functionality issues include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your web presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems could be caused by things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues corrected 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 plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your potential clients 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 information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current clients as well. Features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found will provide users with a good experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Visitors want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that lead to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken images with well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like allowing them to comment on, 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 navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential clients 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 and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code writing.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you completely customize the look of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professional looking themes built for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your site such as color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using the WP web content management software is that WordPress gives you modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited extra features.

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you want done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or you can buy relatively cheaply and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WP Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

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

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have 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 using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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