Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where attractive things matter, how your web site looks is very important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a potential buyers see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We typically do it mostly online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s web site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

What your potential customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your site:

Web Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can affect your visitor’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the color combinations you select will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these issues are caused by external things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues get addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment across social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and easy 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 as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), 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 clients but also current customers. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content can be easily found will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to your product pages with professionally-taken graphics and well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps users decide to stick around on your site is providing 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 users to move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also your current clients too.

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

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

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you quickly customize the look and feel of your site with only a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

Learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WP Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

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

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

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could lose you potential buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that you would like integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that will help you get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need 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 online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discount codes, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be downloaded for free, or can be purchased relatively cheaply, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for web visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website and better website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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