Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website can lose you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this could affect their decision to purchase from you.

We do it mostly online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse a web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

What your web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

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

Site Design Issues

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

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the palettes you select will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable for any website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, problems could be caused by factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities 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 functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete their transactions using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your site visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. 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 prospective customers but existing customers too. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links which direct customers to your product pages by inserting great product pictures beside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, like allowing them to comment on, 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 within your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires modifying code extensively.

If you are researching the process of getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth 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 Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you immediately modify the look of your entire site without affecting the website’s content or modifying the core software functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

You can learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To WP Themes

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress provides users with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up losing you prospective clients.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that you want to integrate into 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 on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful WordPress plugins that can be downloaded and are freely available, or are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them returning to your website.

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, they will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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