Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-built website could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your website can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a potential client sees and this can affect their decision to buy your products or use your services.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

What your web visitors 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 factors than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site:

Website Design Issues

Some common design issues that can influence your prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the palettes you use will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other orientation elements like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems may include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems could be related to external factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where customers suffer most due to a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common issues that can create a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your 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. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current customers as well. Having features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide users with a good experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Users stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations with well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to browse quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of existing clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you completely modify the look of your website without affecting the website’s content or changing any underlying software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many of these are either free, or they can be bought quite inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your website such as the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up costing you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you want integrated into your website, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WP 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 site 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 goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that you can install on your site at no cost, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Expand Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

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

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 the WordPress CMS software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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