Are you losing customers because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where looks matter, the way your web site looks is very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

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

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your web site appear to them? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

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

Site Design Problems

Common web design problems that can impact a visitor’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is arranged can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how 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 accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose opportunities.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on a website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these issues could be related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get problems repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical issues that can cause a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that visitors 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 potential customers but also current customers. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found will help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Customers stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations beside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another thing that helps customers decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed 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 prospective customers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if the work requires editing code.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you quickly change the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing the design on your website like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress web content management platform is that WordPress provides site owners with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can end up costing you prospective customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole web site 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 transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, complete their transactions with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow site users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep visitors returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these potential customers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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