Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website could lose you many new customers.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, the way your web site looks can be very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a prospective buyer sees and this could affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse somebody’s website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your digital presence appear to others? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What 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 factors than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Website Design Problems

Typical design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site.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 and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are structured can have a significant effect on the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business opportunity losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in any website, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these issues may be caused by things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer most because of a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your prospective customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current clients. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that lead to your product pages with professionally-taken product images next to well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, like features that let users leave comments, 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 users to be able to navigate quickly within 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 most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

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

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires extensive web coding.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to immediately modify the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content and changing the underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of great-looking WP themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your site such as color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress provides site owners with almost unlimited 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 issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can cost you prospective customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your whole 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!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your potential clients will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better website 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 or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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