Are you losing customers because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-built web site can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can affect the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective buyer sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably turn on our mobile device and go visit somebody’s website first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to engage with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Site Design Problems

Some common web design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the palettes you decide on will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unexciting, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is laid out can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems are caused by things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users specific features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical problems that can cause a disappointing user experience can include some of following:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your potential customers 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 visitors 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 potential buyers but also current clients. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where related content is grouped or linked together will provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Features – Customers want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which direct customers to product pages with great graphics beside well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps users want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like features that let users 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 … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you completely customize the look of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing design settings on your website such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another great reason to choose the WP website publishing platform is that WordPress gives you modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could lose you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature you would like integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins built for WordPress users that you can install on your site at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

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

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