Are you losing customers because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site can cost you potential new customers and a lot of money.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the design of your web site can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we will switch to our mobile phone and go visit someone’s site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to online users? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

What web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your site:

Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can impact your user’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the palettes you use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can turn prospects away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues may include some following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for any website, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems may be caused by things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current customers also. Things such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean areas where related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that point to product pages with professionally-taken product images next to well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, like 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure 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 usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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

Now … what if you have arrived here 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 also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if it requires extensive web code modification.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Inexpensive Web Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to completely modify the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the site’s content and modifying the core software functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking themes created for WordPress available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings of your site like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress content publishing platform is that WordPress provides website owners with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site 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 turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your WordPress Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep visitors returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will 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 website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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