Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-built web site? A poorly-constructed web site could lose you valuable business.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, how your web site looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your potential clients see and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

Think about how most people research businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse someone’s site first before buying goods in-store or online.

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 cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Common design issues that can influence a user’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the palettes you select will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience business opportunity losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues may include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems could be related to things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations in social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Typical issues that can create a poor user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site 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 prospective buyers 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 files to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), 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 prospective buyers but existing clients as well. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links that lead to product pages with eye-catching graphics with well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as allowing them to comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also your existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing website with design issues that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if the work requires modifying web code extensively.

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

(WordPress can help 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 of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to easily modify the look and feel of your entire site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design like color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides you with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could end up losing you prospective clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform 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 customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discount codes, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins designed for WordPress site owners that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Expand Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, they will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, this information 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 please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

***

***