Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed site? A poorly-constructed web site could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the design of your web site can affect your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse somebody’s website before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your digital presence appear to others? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just some of the main design problems that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Problems

Some common design problems that can impact your prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the color schemes you choose will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is arranged can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other guiding features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems may be caused by 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 consistently proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where prospective buyers suffer most due to a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment across social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some common issues that can cause a disappointing user experience can include:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your visitors 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 content 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 isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current customers. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken product images and well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps customers want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, such as allowing them to comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information 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 ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 website is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if it requires a lot of code writing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you completely customize the look and feel of your entire site without touching the site’s content or modifying any core software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes created for WordPress site owners available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings on your site such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up losing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you want integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WP 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 and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress that you can install on your site at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap to purchase and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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