Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, the way your website looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit a web site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to others? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Web Design Problems

Some of the most common design issues that can impact your prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the palettes you use will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually boring, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is laid out can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, 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 potential loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems may be caused by things like 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 as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete their purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction across social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical problems that can cause a bad user experience include some or all of the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your potential customers 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 content to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing customers. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together can provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Site – Users want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages by inserting beautiful graphics next to well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as 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 users to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often 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 compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As the above shows, 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 risk of not only losing potential customers but also your current customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if the work requires extensive coding.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to immediately modify the look of your site with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress site owners available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing the design of your website like color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Expansion

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

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features.

Earlier in this article we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could cost you potential customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that you need integrated into your website, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire 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 turn your website 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 visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

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

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for customers.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these potential buyers will not return and 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 web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP web content publishing platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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