Are you losing customers because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site could lose you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a potential clients see and this can affect their decision to purchase.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s web site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your web presence appear to them? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Here are just some of the main design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful orientation elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable business opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality issues can include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems could be caused by 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 attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that suffers the most due to a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical issues that can cause a poor user experience include some of following:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your customers 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 files to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that visitors 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 clients but existing customers too. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations and well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, like the ability to 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 around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business 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 like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WP Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to instantly modify the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing your website’s design such as color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP Themes – An Overview

WordPress Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up costing you prospective buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that does what you want your site to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need 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 WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, complete their transactions with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Website’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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