Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-designed web site? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site can cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, the look of your website can affect your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your visitor sees and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web presence appear to others? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the key design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Site Design Issues

Common web design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated and just plain hard to read text can easily turn prospects off your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is laid out can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality issues may include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, these problems are caused by external factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that all issues are fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, enter coupons, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where potential clients suffer the most due to a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations on social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Common issues that can create a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your site visitors 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 content 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 buyers but existing clients also. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links which point to product pages by inserting beautiful images alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps users decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as features that let users 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 … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored 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 to add legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires modifying code extensively.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you quickly customize the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the site’s content and modifying any underlying software.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing the design of your website such as color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is 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.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Powerful Features

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides site owners with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited additional functionality.

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can end up losing you prospective buyers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are WP 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 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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins for WordPress users that you can install on your website free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep visitors returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. 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 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 expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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