Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built website could cost you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit somebody’s site before making our next move.

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

What your web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your site:

Website Design Issues

Common web design problems that can affect your prospect’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the color schemes you want to use will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain hard to read text can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can have a significant effect on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As online information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential customers.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, these problems are caused by things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems get corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Some of the most common problems that can create a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure places. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content 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 content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients too. Things such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics with well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like allowing them 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 … You also want users to move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, 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 success online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also your existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived on this site because you currently have an existing website with design problems that may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if the work requires modifying code.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to completely change the look of your website without touching the site’s content and changing any underlying software functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress content publishing software is that WordPress provides users with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up costing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a WP plugin that will do what you want your site to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, images 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 notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WordPress 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.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Expanding Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you give your customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep visitors coming back to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your prospective customers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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