Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-built web site could lose you many new customers.

In a world where looks matter, the look of your web site can play a significant part in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go browse a site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the key design issues that can affect your website:

Web Design Issues

Common design issues that can influence your prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you decide on will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain ugly visual elements can turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential business opportunities.

Website Functionality Problems

Some common functionality issues include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence reflects your business. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these problems may be caused by factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get problems repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discount codes, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-designed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your customers 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 files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current customers. Features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links which lead to your product pages with great images next to well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website 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 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 site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also some of current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you currently have an existing website with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if the work requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are researching the process of getting a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we strongly recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you completely change the look of your entire site in minutes.

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

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings on your site such as color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WP web site management software is that WordPress provides you with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up losing you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a WP plugin that does what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website such as links not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins designed for WordPress that you can download and install on your website free of charge, or that you can purchase relatively cheaply, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With WP Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep visitors returning to your website.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WordPress platform please see our related posts section.

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