Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built site? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-designed web site could end up losing you potential new clients and a lot of money.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your web site can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their decision to purchase.

We typically do things online. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we may turn on our smart phone and go browse somebody’s site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Design Problems

Common web design problems that can impact your visitor’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain hard to read text can easily turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can have a significant effect on how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur potential business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues can include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your online presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, these problems are related to factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their frustrations in social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Some of the most common issues that can create a bad user experience include some of following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your product information should not be kept in obscure places. Your web visitors 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 files to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients too. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Customers want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages by inserting eye-catching graphics alongside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like the ability 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 visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a 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 impact your business results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also existing customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if the work requires extensive coding.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you immediately modify the look of your entire site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or can be bought for a relatively small price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design such as the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose the WordPress web content publishing platform is that WordPress gives users powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can cost you prospective clients.

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

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

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

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can download and easily install on your site at no cost, or that you can purchase for a relatively small price, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your WP Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow site visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them coming back to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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