Are you losing customers because of poor web design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-built web site can cost you many new customers.

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

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s website first before purchasing something in-store or online.

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

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design problems that can affect your site:

Website Design Problems

Some common web design issues that can impact your potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain old ugly images can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose business opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems get repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete their transactions using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where prospective clients suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your prospective clients 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. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current clients. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content can be easily found will provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to your product pages with professionally-taken product pictures beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only 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 to provide interactive features that engage customers, like features that let them\visitors 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 visitors to browse quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also existing customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting web code extensively.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we strongly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Instant Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you easily modify the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress site owners available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing the design of your site like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited features.

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that you want integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you want done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert 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 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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discount coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep them returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

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 WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

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