Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website can end up costing you potential new customers and a lot of money.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can be important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your potential customers see and this can affect their decision to buy your products and use your services.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse a site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

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

Website Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can impact your visitor’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the colors you use will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly visual elements can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful assistive elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant business losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, these issues could be related to 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 you get issues addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer most due to a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Typical problems that can cause a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your product information 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 information 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 site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current clients also. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links that point to your product pages by inserting great images beside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as features that let users 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 navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident 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 compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if the work requires modifying web code extensively.

If you are researching the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to immediately change the look of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Modular Expansion

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

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up losing you prospective buyers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you need your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected with your site such as links not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins built for WordPress users that you can download and easily install on your site at no cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Expand Your Site’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your customers.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep them returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making 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 information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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