Are you losing business because of a poorly-built site? A poorly-constructed web site could cost you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the design of your website can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively switch to our smart phone and go browse a web site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to them? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What customers 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 influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s review some of the key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Issues

Common web design issues that can impact your user’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the colors you decide on will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can easily turn prospects off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all problems get corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discounts, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer the most because of a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

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

Here are just some of the most common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current clients as well. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content is grouped or linked together can provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Users want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with eye-popping images next to well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as features that let users comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to move quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Website – 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 you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires modifying code extensively.

If you are researching the process of getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Customizable Web Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you instantly change the look of your entire site without affecting the site’s content or changing any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they can be purchased quite inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing your site’s design like the color, template elements like menus and headers, page 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 ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up losing you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you want your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform 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 on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be downloaded for free, or you can buy quite cheaply and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

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

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

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

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

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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