Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built web site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site could lose you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design can be very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your web visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web site appear to other people? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious 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 affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Design Problems

Some of the most common web design problems that can impact a visitor’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the color schemes you choose will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality problems may include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, problems are caused by things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your prospective customers 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. spreadsheets), 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 potential buyers but existing customers also. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps users want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage 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 be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing site with design issues that could be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires editing code.

If you are considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you completely change the look and feel of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

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

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using the WP website publishing platform is that WordPress gives you powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up costing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a plugin that will do what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your site like links not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress 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, enter discount coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or can be purchased quite inexpensively and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them 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 using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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