Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed web site? A poorly-built web site can lose you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitors see and this can influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how you do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s just doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit somebody’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web site appear to them? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Web Design Problems

Typical design problems that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you want to use will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can significantly impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working at all times. Sometimes, these problems are caused by external factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where potential clients suffer the most because of a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations in social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are just some of the more common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. 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.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current customers also. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that point to product pages by inserting eye-catching images beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience 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 helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable 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 web site includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take some time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if the work requires rewriting web code extensively.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we strongly suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to immediately customize the look of your entire website without touching the site’s content or changing any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional themes for WordPress users available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing your website’s design such as color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another great reason to build your site using the WP content management platform is that WordPress provides website owners with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like to add to your site, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

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

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improving Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep people returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

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