Are you losing business because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-designed web site could cost you prospective customers and important sales.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the look of your website can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your web site appear to them? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

What your web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your website:

Site Design Issues

Common design issues that can affect your potential customer’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the palettes you use will display correctly across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated and just plain hard to read text can turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your content is arranged can have a significant impact on how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems include the following:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. Sometimes, problems could be related to external factors such as 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 issues fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current clients. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that lead to your product pages with eye-popping photos or illustrations beside well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps customers want to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like features that let users comment on, 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 users to navigate 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 ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take some time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires extensive web coding.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you instantly customize the look and feel of your website with only a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professional themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up costing you potential buyers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like to add to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of great plugins that you can download and easily install on your site at no cost, or can be purchased quite cheaply and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, they will simply move on to another business with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues 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 website please see our related posts section.

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