Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-built web site can cost you potential buyers and a lot of money.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design is very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a potential buyer sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically switch on our smart device and go visit a website first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What your customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your website:

Website Design Problems

Common design problems that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the palettes you want to use will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can have a significant impact in how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues include the following:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems may be caused by things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues get corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter discounts, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction in social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your customers 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 files to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing clients too. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where related content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Customers want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations next to well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them to comment on, 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 move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that 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 that your web site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively 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 customers but also your current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing website with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if it requires a lot of code editing.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Customizable Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you easily modify the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress users available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or can be bought relatively cheaply, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing the design of your website like the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited additional features.

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could lose you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected with your site such as links not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire 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 let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use 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 discount codes, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your site at no cost, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Web Site’s 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 website users.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this information has given you 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 please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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