Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-built website can cost you many new customers.

In a world where attractive things matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their decision to buy your products or use your services.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse a web site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your site:

Website Design Issues

Common web design issues that can impact your user’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you want to use will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is arranged can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since online 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 website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues include:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable in a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your online presence reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to factors 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 corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer most because of a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Some of the most common problems that can cause a bad user experience include some or all of the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your potential buyers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current clients as well. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting eye-catching images and well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another area that helps customers want to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, like the ability to comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want users to move quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

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 site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting web code extensively.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Website Design

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

There are thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or can be purchased quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier in this article we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up costing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that you need to add to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you need your website to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole web site is 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!

Need a plugin that will turn 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 online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of great WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Enhancing Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these potential clients will not return and 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 issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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