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

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, the way your website looks is becoming more important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

We typically do it mostly online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s site before taking the next step.

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

What web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

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

Site Design Problems

Some of the most common design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the colors you choose will display correctly across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is laid out can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful orientation features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience significant loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems may include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems may be caused by factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users 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 choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed 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 disappointment on social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your 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 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 existing customers also. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which point to product pages by inserting professionally-taken product pictures next to well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident 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 business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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 website is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also your current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website with design issues that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you quickly modify the look of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of great-looking WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress – Powerful Features

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited extra functionality.

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

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire site 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins built for WordPress that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Blog’s Capability

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 give customers a great user experience.

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

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

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

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