Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed web site can cost you many new customers.

In a world where attractive things matter, your website’s design is very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse a web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your website appear to other people? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

What potential clients see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

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

Site Design Issues

Common web design issues that can affect your visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you use will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As online information is now accessed through 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 display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur potential business losses.

Website Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality issues may include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems could be related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are some common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your potential buyers 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. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing customers. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Customers want websites 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, highlight hyperlinks that point to product pages with great product images and well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on this site because you have an existing site with design issues 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 the work requires a lot of web code writing.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that allow you to immediately modify the look and feel of your website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design like the color, elements like menus and headers, page 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 helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Modular Features

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new features.

Earlier in this post we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up losing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you want integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will help you get the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected with your website such as links not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that you can download and easily install on your website at no cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

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