Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built site? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-constructed web site could cost you prospective new clients and important sales.

In a world where appearances matter, the look of your web site can be important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could influence their decision to use your services.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we still turn on our smart phone and go visit somebody’s website first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design problems that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Website Design Problems

Common design problems that can impact a user’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 the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the colors you choose will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other assistive features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience potential business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems may include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems could be caused by external things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are just some common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current customers too. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found can help provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Customers want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with great graphics beside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as features that let them\visitors comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, financial 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 site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are in the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you easily change the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be bought relatively cheaply, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

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

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

Earlier in this article we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your website and are freely available, or are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Expand Your Blog’s Functionality

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 create a great user experience for your visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive 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 that does offer them a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business 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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