Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-designed web site could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your web site looks can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit a site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to online users? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

What 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 factors than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Website Design Issues

Common design problems that can influence a visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the palettes you use will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can easily turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality problems include:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your online presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, these problems may be caused by factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that suffers most 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 to venting their dissatisfaction on social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are some of the most common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your prospective clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing customers too. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting great images beside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just 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 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 support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to browse quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Site – 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 visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of existing clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you quickly modify the look of your site without touching the site’s content or modifying any of the underlying software.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free, or they can be bought for a relatively small price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing the design on your website like the color, template elements like headers and footers, page 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:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins designed for WordPress site owners that can be easily downloaded for free, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide your visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these prospective clients will simply move on to another business with a better website.

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

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