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

In a world where attractive design matters, the look of your website can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a potential clients see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go visit a site before taking the next step.

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

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can affect a visitor’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated and just plain ugly images can turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues can include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable in a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are working all the time. Sometimes, these issues could be caused by factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. 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 files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors 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 prospective clients but existing clients too. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with great photos or illustrations and well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as 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 be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of code modification.

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to completely modify the look of your entire website without touching the website’s content and modifying the core software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WP themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing your website’s design settings like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WordPress – Modular Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your site like links not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that you can download and install on your site at no cost, or that you can buy for a small cost and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, now you have 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 WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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