Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-built site? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website can cost you prospective new clients and cause more issues than you could ever wish for.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, how your website looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitors see and this could influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit a website before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to online users? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What prospects 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 influence your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

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

Let’s review some of the key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Design Problems

Common design issues that can affect a prospect’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the color schemes you want to use will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems can include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these issues may be related to things like 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 get corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where customers suffer the most due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical problems that can lead to a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your customers 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. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing clients also. Things such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Website – Users want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with great images with well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as allowing them 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 … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly through 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 ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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 prospective customers but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a 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 editing code extensively.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you immediately customize the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be bought for a relatively reasonable cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing design settings of your website 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 achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited features or new functionality.

Earlier in this article we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could lose you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website such as links not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow web users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep users returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better 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 using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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