Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-built site? A poorly-designed website can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your potential client sees and this can affect their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go visit a website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

What web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Issues

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

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the color combinations you choose will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems could be caused by factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discount codes, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing customers. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clean sections where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics beside well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps visitors want to stay longer 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 help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to move quickly around your site and access your information 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 ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively 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 customers but also your existing clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived on our site because you have an existing website with design issues that are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering having a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes created for WordPress users available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either free, or can be bought for a relatively small price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing design settings on your site such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress provides website owners with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited additional functionality.

Earlier in this article we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could lose you prospective customers.

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

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your site like links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

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

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced 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 customers.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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