Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-built website? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-designed website could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, your website’s design is becoming more important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to other people? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your web site:

Web Design Problems

Typical design issues that can affect your user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the color schemes you use will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful guiding features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential business opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems may include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page 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. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these issues are related to things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where prospective buyers suffer the most because of a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction across social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some common issues that can create a disappointing user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your potential buyers 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current clients too. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which point to product pages by inserting professionally-taken product images with well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like features that let them\visitors 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires editing code extensively.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently publish more articles 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 – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you quickly modify the look of your entire site without touching the site’s content and modifying any core software.

There are literally thousands of professional themes for WordPress site owners available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing the design of your website like the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page 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 works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited additional features.

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

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that will do what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins for WordPress site owners that you can install on your website at $0 cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With WP Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, 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 nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or website experience.

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

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