Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the way your web site looks can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We mostly do things online. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may switch on our mobile phone and go visit a website first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Website Design Problems

Typical design problems that can affect a prospect’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the color schemes you choose will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated or just plain ugly visual elements can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems can include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. Sometimes, these problems could be related to external things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems get fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like 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 items to a cart, apply discount coupons, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

Typical issues that can cause a disappointing user experience can include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should not be kept in obscure places. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing clients. Features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct visitors to product pages by inserting great graphics next to well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability 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 … You also want users to browse quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting 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 policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if what needs doing requires extensive code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you immediately change the look and feel of your site with just a few mouse clicks.

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

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing your site’s design like color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up losing you potential customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your website like links not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of great WordPress plugins that you can download and install on your site at $0 cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, 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 enhanced user experience that will keep users returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this post 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

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