Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-built website can lose you prospective new customers and cause more issues than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically jump online and go visit somebody’s web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Website Design Issues

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

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the colors you select will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other guiding elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally 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 may lose potential business opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues can include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems could be related to factors 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 get issues repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like 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 discount coupons, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction on social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can lead to a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current customers also. Features such as 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.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages with great graphics with well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, like allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant 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 potential clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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 website is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if the work requires changing a lot of web code.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Instant Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that enable you to immediately modify the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional WP themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design settings like color, elements like menus, headers, footers, page 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 to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

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

Earlier we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up losing you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality you would like to add to your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce 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 functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that you can download and easily install on your website and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Expand Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow web visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep them coming back to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using the WordPress CMS platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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