Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed web site? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-constructed website could end up losing you prospective new customers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can be very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a prospective buyer sees and this could influence their decision to purchase from you.

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

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your digital presence appear to others? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Here are just some of the main design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can impact your prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the color schemes you select will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old ugly graphic elements can easily turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality issues include:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, these issues are caused by external factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all problems are repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective clients 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 content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing customers as well. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links that lead to product pages with beautiful product pictures with well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, like features that let users 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 move quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website 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 isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also current clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if what needs doing requires modifying code.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that enable you to completely modify the look of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress are responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing design settings on your website like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Modular Functionality

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this post we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up losing you potential buyers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature you want integrated into your website, just install a plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are 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 turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins built for WordPress site owners that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or you can purchase for a relatively small cost, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow customers 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 them coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, they will 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 using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

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