Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-built website could end up costing you potential new clients and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where appearances matter, the design of your web site can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if it’s just doing preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before making our next move.

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

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can influence a prospect’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the palettes you use will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful guiding features like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, 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 will incur business losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems may be caused by things like 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 attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, 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 discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your service information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients as well. Having features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages with professionally-taken product pictures next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps users decide to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you have an existing website with design issues that are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to immediately customize the look of your entire site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of great-looking themes designed for WordPress available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be bought quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing the design on your site like color, template elements like headers and footers, page 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 your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives website owners modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up costing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your website 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 visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins that you can download and install on your site for free, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Extend Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you give your website users a great user experience.

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

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

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

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