Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-built web site can lose you potential buyers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design matters, the design of your website can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this can affect their decision to buy your products and use your services.

We typically do it online. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we still turn to our mobile phone and go visit a web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

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

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts 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 Issues

Typical web design problems that can impact your potential customer’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the colors you choose will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can turn prospects away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can have an impact impact on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As online information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience potential business opportunity losses.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues can include:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in a website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your web presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. In some cases, these issues are caused by things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where prospective customers suffer the most because of a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their frustrations across social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your site 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 information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current clients also. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that point to your product pages by inserting great images and well-written descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like features that let users leave comments, 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 move quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute 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 serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also current clients too.

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

First, understand that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if it requires extensive coding.

If you are considering getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you easily modify the look and feel of your site without touching the website’s content or modifying any of the core software functionality.

There are thousands of professional WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing the design on your site like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this post we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up losing you prospective buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you want integrated with your website, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website like links not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole website 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 website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress site owners that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap to buy and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Enhancing Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide customers with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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