Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-constructed website could cost you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective customers see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will switch to our mobile device and go visit a site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

The way your site looks 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 Poor Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Some common design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Poor color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you want to use will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can have an impact impact in the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are not acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these issues are caused by things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems are addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, buy 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 web site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their disappointment across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are some of the more common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your prospective buyers 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 information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing clients. Having features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links that lead to your product pages by inserting eye-popping images alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps customers decide to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let them\visitors 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 visitors to move quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – 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 visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also some of current clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires a lot of coding.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to quickly change the look of your site without touching the site’s content or changing any of the underlying software.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes created for WordPress site owners available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing your website’s design such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose the WP web site publishing software is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could lose you potential buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that you would like integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply discount coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that can be downloaded and are freely available, or that can be bought for a reasonable cost and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

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

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

Hopefully, this article 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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