Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-built website could lose you many new customers.

In a world where looks matter, how your web site looks can be important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their decision to do business with you.

We mostly do things online. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit a site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to them? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What your 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 factors than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

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

Site Design Issues

Common design issues that can affect your visitor’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the color schemes you use will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable for a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to 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 attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, complete their transactions with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction in social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your 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 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 web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing clients too. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Features – Customers stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages with beautiful images alongside well-written descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, like allowing them to comment on, 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 move quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make 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 of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site 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 site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you currently have an existing website with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web development.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing website, then we highly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you easily customize the look and feel of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your site’s design such as the color, elements like menus and headers, page 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 helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could cost you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues 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 plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discount codes, complete their transactions using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins for WordPress site owners that you can download and install on your site for free, 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:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you provide web users with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, they will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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