Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s web site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your website appear to online users? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately move forward with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s review some of the main design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Web Site Design Issues

Common design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the palettes you decide on will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is arranged can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through 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 work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose business opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems may include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable on a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your online presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to external factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get problems fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your product information should be easy to find. Your site visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), 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 clients but also existing clients. Features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links which lead to your product pages by inserting eye-popping product pictures and well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to leave comments, 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 browse quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you currently have an existing site with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web coding.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Customizable Website Design

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

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

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design such as the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

Plugins – Powerful Features

Another great reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives site owners almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could cost you prospective buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform 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 products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter coupons, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins that you can download and easily install on your website at no cost, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Capability

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users returning for more.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WordPress website management platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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