Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-constructed website can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective client sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We mostly do things online. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s website before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some of the main design issues that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Problems

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

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the colors you use will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is structured can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant loss of customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems can include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by things like your web 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 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 choose and add items to a cart, enter discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Common issues that can create a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to find. Your web 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. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing clients. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with eye-popping photos or illustrations beside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps users decide to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to move quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms 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 success 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 your current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you currently have an existing site with design issues that could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting problems addressed on an existing website can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if the work requires modifying web code extensively.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to immediately change the look and feel of your site without affecting the website’s content and modifying any underlying software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WP themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be bought quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing design settings on your website like color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides site owners with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that you can download and easily install on your website and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap to buy and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep visitors coming back 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, these consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website and user experience.

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 website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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