Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-designed website can lose you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your web site looks is very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do it online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

What potential clients see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) 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 Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site:

Site Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can impact your prospect’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the colors you decide on will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working all the time. In some cases, problems may be related to factors 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 all issues get fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use coupons, complete their orders 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 due to a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Some of the most common problems that can cause a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current clients too. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Customers want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages with beautiful product pictures next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps customers want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like the ability to 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 … You also want users to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also some of existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires modifying code extensively.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Instant Web Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you quickly customize the look of your site without affecting the site’s content or changing the underlying software.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either free, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing your site’s design such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WordPress web content management platform is that WordPress gives users expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited features or functionality.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could lose you potential clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that will get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform 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 easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your website free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Expand Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, your prospective clients 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 our related posts section.

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