Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website could lose you potential buyers and cause more havoc than you could ever wish for.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, the way your web site looks can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this can affect their decision to purchase from you.

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

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

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some of the key design issues that can affect your web site:

Website Design Issues

Some common web design problems that can affect a visitor’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the palettes you use will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other assistive elements like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, 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 could lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues are related to factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get problems repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors specific features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Here are some common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your prospective customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for 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.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current customers. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that lead to product pages with professionally-taken photos or illustrations and well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like 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 … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly around your site 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 ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results 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 existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if the work requires a lot of coding.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Inexpensive Web Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to easily customize the look of your entire website with just a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes 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 themes are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing the design of your site such as color, elements like headers and footers, 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 to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress provides users with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can lose you prospective customers.

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

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your site 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 products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins built for WordPress that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Expand Your Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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