Are you losing customers because of a poorly-constructed web site? No matter how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-designed website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, the design of your website can be important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a potential buyer sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

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

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Common design problems that can impact a user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the palettes you use will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, problems are related to external factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get problems repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can lead to a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your customers 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. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing clients. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Features – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which direct customers to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations next to well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, like allowing them 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 visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also current clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code writing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing website, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you easily modify the look of your entire site with only a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be purchased for a relatively reasonable cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes

WordPress – Modular Scalability

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

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

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can lose you prospective customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a WP plugin that will get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing 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 problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that you can install on your website free of charge, or that can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep visitors coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business 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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