Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-constructed website? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-designed website could cost you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, the look of your website can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your potential clients see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will typically turn to our mobile phone and go visit someone’s website before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to others? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

What prospective customers 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 influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some key design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the colors you select will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly visual elements can easily turn prospective clients away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have a significant effect on the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur potential business losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality problems may include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working at all times. Sometimes, these issues are related to things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discounts, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should be easy to find. Your visitors 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing clients. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clean sections where your content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links that lead to your product pages with beautiful graphics beside well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like allowing them to comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content 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 ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site 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 serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also some of existing clients too.

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

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

If you are considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you quickly modify the look and feel of your website without touching the website’s content and changing the core software.

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

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing design settings on your site like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose the WP web site publishing software is that WordPress gives site owners powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited features.

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up costing you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you want to integrate with your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell 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 transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins designed for WordPress site owners that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Extending Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you 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 WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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