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

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design is very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can influence their decision to do business with you.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit somebody’s site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

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

What your customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately move forward with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some key design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Site Design Problems

Common design issues that can affect a potential customer’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to the use of 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 various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain ugly graphic elements can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can have a significant effect on the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other guiding features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems could be caused by factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues are corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, 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, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

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

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should be easy to find. Your prospective buyers 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 content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing clients. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to your product pages with eye-catching photos or illustrations with well-crafted 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.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, like the ability to leave comments, 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 … You also want users to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also your current clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently share more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you quickly modify the look of your website without affecting the website’s content or changing the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes built for WordPress users available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either free, or they can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

WP Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides you with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up losing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use discount codes, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins built for WordPress that you can download and install on your site at $0 cost, or you can purchase relatively cheaply and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Expand Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact online 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 and engaging user experience that will keep them returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these potential customers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

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