Are you losing customers because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-constructed website can end up losing you potential customers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where first impressions matter, how your website looks is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective buyer sees and this can affect their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse a website first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Web Site Design Issues

Some of the most common web design problems that can influence your potential customer’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to using 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 use will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are structured can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience business losses.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. In some cases, problems could be related to external factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discount codes, complete their orders with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that suffers most due to a poorly-built web 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 vent their dissatisfaction across social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can lead to a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your 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 content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current customers also. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Customers want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links that lead to product pages by inserting professionally-taken product pictures and well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as features that let users comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to browse quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for content 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 comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your 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 and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing site with design issues that are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently share more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you instantly customize the look of your website with just a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing design settings on your website such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, 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 helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Powerful Features

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited features.

Earlier in this post we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can end up costing you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature you would like integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that does what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your website such as links not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress that you can install on your website and are freely available, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these prospective clients will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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