Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed site? A poorly-designed website can lose you many new customers.

In a world where looks matter, the look of your website is becoming more important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still switch on our mobile phone and go visit a site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to others? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common design problems that can influence a potential customer’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can 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 ensure that the colors you select will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems may include some or all of the following:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. In some cases, these problems may be caused by things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems get fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that suffers most due to a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction on social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Typical issues that can cause a disappointing user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current customers also. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations beside well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like the ability to leave comments, 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 visitors to browse quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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 serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site 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 quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code writing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you completely customize the look and feel of your entire site without touching the site’s content or modifying any of the core software.

There are thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress site owners available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Features

Another great reason to build your site using the WP web site publishing software is that WordPress gives users powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can cost you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website like links not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues 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 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, apply coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that you can install on your site at $0 cost, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improve Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and better user experience.

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

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