Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-constructed web site can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your website can affect the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a prospective customers see and this can affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go visit a web site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to online users? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Common design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the color schemes you use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems can include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working all the time. Sometimes, these problems are caused by external things 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 problems are corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan 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 discount codes, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment on social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Typical issues that can create a disappointing user experience can include some of following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Your service information should not be kept in obscure corners. Your potential clients 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. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing customers. Features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found will help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting beautiful images next to well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as the ability 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 be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this site because you have an existing site with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires writing code.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to quickly modify the look of your entire website without affecting the website’s content or modifying the underlying software.

There are thousands of professional looking themes built for WordPress available that you can download and install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing your website’s design like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, 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.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WP Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP content publishing software is that WordPress gives site owners scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this article we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up costing you potential customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will get the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of great WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you provide your customers with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your prospective customers will 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 expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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