Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, the way your website looks can be very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your web visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit someone’s site before deciding what to do next.

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

What customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to do business with you.

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

Let’s review some of the key design issues that can affect your site:

Web Design Issues

Typical design problems that can affect your potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the color combinations you select will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can have a significant impact on how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful orientation elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience potential loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems can include some following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable in any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are related to factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues are repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply coupons, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical problems that can create a bad user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure corners. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current customers as well. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found can provide users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Visitors want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links which lead to your product pages by inserting great graphics and well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as 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 within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are researching the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress web content publishing platform on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you quickly change the look and feel of your entire site without touching the website’s content or modifying any of the core software functionality.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that you can download and 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 themes are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your site’s design such as color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress gives site owners scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited additional features.

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could cost you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you want to integrate with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your site like links not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want 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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discount coupons, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or that are relatively cheap and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your WP Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and user 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 the WordPress website management software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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