Are you losing customers because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-built website could cost you potential new customers and important sales.

In a world where attractive design sells, the way your web site looks is very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably fire up our laptop and go visit a website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to others? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What customers 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’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Problems

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

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the palettes you want to use will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old ugly images can easily turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality problems include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your web presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are related to external things such as 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 problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

Common problems that can cause a bad user experience can include:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors 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 clients but also existing clients. Having features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken product pictures and well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps customers want to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your existing clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires extensive coding.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we highly recommend that you consider using the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to completely change the look of your entire website with only a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes designed for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide users 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. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like to integrate with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or that can be purchased relatively cheaply, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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