Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed site? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-designed web site could lose you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design matters, the way your web site looks can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably turn on our smart device and go browse somebody’s site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your digital presence appear to online users? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant 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 influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design problems that can affect your website:

Site Design Problems

Common web design problems that can impact a user’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the colors you choose will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain old ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your content is laid out can have an impact impact in the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality issues include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in a website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to external factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that all issues are repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors certain functionality, 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 easily select and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where customers suffer the most due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Common problems that can lead to a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your prospective buyers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing clients also. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct users to your product pages by inserting eye-popping photos or illustrations beside well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, 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 results online. If your site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code modification.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you instantly customize the look of your website without affecting the site’s content or changing the underlying site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or can be purchased quite cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

WordPress – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives users expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited features.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could cost you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you need your website to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website like links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Enhance Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep visitors coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, your potential buyers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and website experience.

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

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