Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed web site could lose you prospective buyers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the design of your website can be important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this can influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if it’s just doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit somebody’s web site first before buying something in-store or online.

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

What your potential buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your site:

Site Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can affect your potential customer’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you decide on will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can have a significant impact in the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your web presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. In some cases, problems could be caused by things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors certain functionalities, 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 users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are just some of the most common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective clients want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. PDF files), 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 existing customers as well. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which direct visitors to product pages by inserting eye-popping product images with well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another area that helps users decide to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as 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 data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and 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 prospective clients but also existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you easily modify the look of your website without affecting the site’s content and changing any core software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be purchased relatively inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can lose you prospective customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality you would like to integrate with your site, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your site like links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter discount coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are relatively cheap to buy and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Expanding Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your website visitors.

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress web content management platform please see our related posts section.

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