Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website can end up losing you potential new clients and important sales.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your web site looks can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their decision to use your services.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Website Design Problems

Some common design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the color schemes you use will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working at all times. In some cases, problems could be caused by external factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get problems corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, complete their orders using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

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

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your 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 reports), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients as well. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which point to your product pages by inserting eye-popping graphics beside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another thing that helps users decide to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to browse quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also your current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress web content management platform on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to immediately change the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the website’s content and changing any core software.

There are thousands of professional WordPress themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design such as color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Features

Another great reason to build your site using the WP website management platform is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can cost you prospective buyers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a plugin that does what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected on your website like links not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

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 WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be downloaded for free, or can be bought for a relatively inexpensive price, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Expand Your Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them 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 WordPress please see our related posts section.

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