Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website could end up losing you potential new clients and a lot of money.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We do it mostly online. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will probably jump online and go browse someone’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s review some of the key design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can affect your potential customer’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the colors you select will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily turn users away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems can include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable in a website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. Sometimes, these issues are caused by 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 all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete their orders with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience can include:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to find. Your prospective clients want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing customers. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content is grouped or linked together can provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Features – Users stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with beautiful graphics with well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

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

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

First, be aware 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 own, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you instantly customize the look of your entire site without affecting the website’s content and modifying the core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional WP themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or can be purchased relatively inexpensively, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Modular Functionality

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

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited features or new functionality.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could lose you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discounts, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins for WordPress users that can be downloaded at no cost, or that can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive cost, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep visitors 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 to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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