Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site could end up costing you potential customers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

We typically do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to others? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your website:

Website Design Problems

Some of the most common web design problems that can impact a potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color combinations you choose will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant business losses.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable for a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your web presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. In some cases, problems may be related to things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get problems fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction on social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Common problems that can cause a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your prospective clients 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. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current clients. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct customers to product pages with beautiful product pictures next to well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another area that helps customers want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, like the ability to 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 … You also want users to move quickly within 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 ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

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

First, be aware that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires editing code.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we strongly recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you quickly customize the look of your site without touching the website’s content and modifying any underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of professional themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or can be purchased for a relatively reasonable price, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing the design of your website like color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new features.

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could cost you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying 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 take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful WP plugins that can be downloaded at no cost, or are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Expand Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep users coming back to your site.

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

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP website management software please see other posts we have published on this site.

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