Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-designed website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, how your web site looks can affect the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will switch to our mobile device and go visit a web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

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

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Here are just some of the main design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can influence a prospect’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you choose will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems are caused by external 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 addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply coupons, complete their transactions with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction on social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective buyers 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing customers. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content can be easily found provides users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that point to product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, such as allowing them 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 visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived here 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 some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you easily modify the look of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either free, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your site like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

WordPress Plugins – Modular Expansion

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

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

Earlier we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can cost you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues 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 plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter discounts, complete their purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your site at $0 cost, or that are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Expand Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. 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.

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

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