Are you losing prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the way your website looks can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit a site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your website appear to online users? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can affect your user’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the palettes you decide on will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience potential loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment on social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common issues that can create a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your service information should not be kept in obscure places. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing customers too. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages by inserting beautiful images and well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps visitors decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as features that let users leave comments, 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 visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a business information 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 contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if it requires editing code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Website Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to immediately customize the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the site’s content or modifying the underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of professional themes created for WordPress site owners available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or can be purchased for a relatively small price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings of your website like color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you would like to add to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site such as links not working, videos not playing, 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 let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want 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 inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins built for WordPress site owners that you can install on your site at no cost, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them coming back for more.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results 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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