Are you losing business because of poor web design? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-designed web site could lose you prospective customers and a lot of money.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design is becoming more important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a prospective customers see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically jump online and go browse someone’s web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your website appear to other people? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What prospects 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 affect your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

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

Website Design Problems

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

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the color schemes you decide on will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, problems may be related to things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these features 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 select and add items to a shopping cart, use discount codes, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where customers suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed web 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 them to vent their disappointment on social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Here are just some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. videos), 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 clients but also existing clients. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where related content can be easily found can provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links that point to your product pages with professionally-taken graphics next to well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, 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 … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization 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 buyers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, earnings 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 results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your existing customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if the work requires extensive web coding.

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you completely change the look and feel of your entire website without touching the website’s content or modifying the core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress site owners available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your website like color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress provides users with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up costing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discount coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be downloaded at no cost, or are relatively cheap to purchase, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Expanding Your Site’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you give visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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