Are you losing customers because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-built web site could cost you potential buyers and cause more turmoil than you can handle.

In a world where looks matter, the look of your web site can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their decision to buy your products or use your services.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your web site appear to them? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Site Design Problems

Common design issues that can influence your user’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you decide on will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain ugly graphic elements can turn prospects away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is laid out can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose opportunities.

Website Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues may include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, these problems could be caused by factors like 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 all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction across social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some of the most common problems that can create a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your service information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your customers 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. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing customers also. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where related content can be easily found can help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links that lead to your product pages with beautiful graphics next to well-written 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 area that helps customers want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as features that let them\visitors 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 browse quickly within your site 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 ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of web code modification.

If you are considering having a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we highly suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Instant Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you completely customize the look of your site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professional WP themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

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

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

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up costing you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want 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 inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great WP plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that you can purchase for a relatively small cost and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

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

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

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems 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 click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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