Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed web site? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-designed web site can lose you prospective buyers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this could affect their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go visit somebody’s website before making our next move.

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

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can impact a potential customer’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the palettes you select will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old ugly visual elements can turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is laid out can have an impact impact on the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on any website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, problems may be related to things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your web visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current clients as well. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages by inserting great product images next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as features that let them\visitors comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate 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 designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if the work requires editing code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress website publishing platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Instant Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that enable you to completely customize the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings of your site such as the color, elements like menus and headers, page 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 helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides you with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up losing you prospective clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like integrated with your site, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are 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 inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful WP plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that you can purchase relatively cheaply, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these potential buyers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, now you have 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 click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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