Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site could lose you valuable business.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s website first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does it invite them to come 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 only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Design Issues

Common web design problems that can affect your user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you use will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain ugly images can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is structured can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other assistive features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential customers.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable in any website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these problems could be caused by things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discount codes, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their frustrations across social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are some of the more common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing clients too. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content can be easily found will provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations beside well-written 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 website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to leave comments, 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 visitors to move quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires extensive web coding.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to easily change the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the site’s content and modifying any underlying software.

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

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your website like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress gives site owners scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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 money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you want integrated into your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want your site to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected with your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole website has gone 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 transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great WP plugins that can be downloaded free of charge, or that you can buy quite inexpensively and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With WP Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, consumers 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 issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using the WP content management software please see our related posts section.

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