Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site can cost you many new customers.

In a world where first impressions matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit a website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to other people? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can impact your prospect’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the palettes you decide on will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can have a significant effect on the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. In some cases, problems may be related to factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get problems addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply discount codes, complete their orders using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some of the more common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive 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 as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing clients. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Features – Customers want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which lead to your product pages with professionally-taken graphics alongside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as the ability to leave comments, 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 … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to easily customize the look of your site without touching the site’s content and changing the core software.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be bought relatively inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives users powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site 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 website could lose you prospective clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that you would like to add to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website like links not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use coupons, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that you can download and easily install on your website free of charge, 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 WP plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your WordPress Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you provide your website users with a great user experience.

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, your prospective clients will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress website publishing software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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