Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed website can end up costing you potential customers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

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

We typically do it mostly online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may switch to our smart device and go visit somebody’s website first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

What your prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your website:

Web Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can influence a user’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the colors you select will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is laid out can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable business opportunities.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working all the time. Sometimes, problems may be related to things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction on social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing clients. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which direct visitors to product pages by inserting eye-popping images next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another area that helps customers want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to leave comments, 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 around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if what needs doing requires extensive coding.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to quickly modify the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or can be bought relatively inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

Plugins – Modular Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides you with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up costing you potential clients.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you want to add to your site, just install a plugin that will get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

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

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Website’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, 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 user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making 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 information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WP software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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