Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-designed web site can end up losing you potential new clients and cause more problems than you can handle.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your visitors see and this can influence their decision to do business with you.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically switch to our smart phone and go visit somebody’s web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web site appear to them? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Site Design Problems

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

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the color combinations you select will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using a range of 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 work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience potential business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems can include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. Sometimes, problems could be caused by external factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all issues are repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Some of the most common problems that can cause a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your potential clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing clients too. Having features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with great images beside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, like the ability 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages 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 potential clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website 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 site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing website with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires rewriting code.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more 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 choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that enable you to quickly modify the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing your website’s design settings like color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, layouts and more. This is 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 WP themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can end up losing you prospective buyers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you want integrated into your site, just install a plugin that does what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website such as links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress that you can download and install on your site and are freely available, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep visitors coming back for more.

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

Hopefully, this article 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 using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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