Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site could lose you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your web site can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before deciding what to do next.

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

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Site Design Problems

Common web design problems that can affect your user’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the color schemes you decide on will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems may include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, these issues are related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get issues fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter coupons, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction across social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that visitors 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 also current clients. Having features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting great graphics beside well-written product 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 aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let them\visitors comment on, 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 move quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your existing clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website with design problems that could be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you immediately change the look and feel of your entire site without touching the site’s content and changing any underlying software.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress users available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing the design on your site such as color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Features

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

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could end up losing you money.

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

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website such as links not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you provide website visitors with a great user experience.

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

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

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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