Are you losing business because of poor web design? A poorly-built web site can lose you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a potential client sees and this can affect their decision to purchase from you.

We typically mostly do it online. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will instinctively switch to our smart device and go browse somebody’s site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to online users? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

What customers 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 influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Web Design Problems

Common design issues that can influence a user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally 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 will lose customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working all the time. In some cases, these issues may be related to factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that suffers most because of a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations in social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website 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 what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current clients also. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which lead to product pages by inserting great images next to well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to browse quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, 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 results online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your existing clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires a lot of web code writing.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more information 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:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to completely customize the look of your entire site without affecting the website’s content or modifying any of the core site functionality.

There are thousands of professional WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page 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 ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could cost you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site 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 on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discounts, complete their purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can download and easily install on your site at $0 cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your visitors.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow 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 rich user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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