Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-built web site can lose you prospective customers and important sales.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your web site looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your potential buyers see and this can affect their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web site appear to online users? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Site Design Problems

Typical design issues that can affect a potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Unattractive 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 make sure that the color schemes you use will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience significant business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable on any website, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems could be related to factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations in social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your potential customers 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 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 potential customers but existing clients too. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where related content can be easily found will help provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct customers to product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations beside well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing site with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if it requires a lot of code writing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides site owners with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could cost you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you would like to integrate with your website, 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 issues detected with your website like links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of great plugins for WordPress site owners that you can install on your site at no cost, or you can buy relatively cheaply, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Site With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow website users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

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

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress content management software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

***

***