Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed site? A poorly-constructed web site could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this can affect their decision to purchase from you.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit a web site before deciding what to do next.

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

What prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) 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 Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Issues

Common design problems that can impact a visitor’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you select will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can easily turn prospects away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction on social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some of the most common problems that can create a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should not be kept in obscure corners. 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 files 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 website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing customers also. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting eye-catching images and well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as features that let users comment on, 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 visitors to move quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and 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 current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are researching the process of getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that enable you to immediately modify the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional looking themes built for WordPress site owners available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they can be purchased relatively cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing the design of your site such as color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page 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 ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

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

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier in this article we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could lose you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you need integrated with your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want your site to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your site such as links not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole 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 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 items to a cart, apply discount codes, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful plugins designed for WordPress site owners that you can download and easily install on your site at no cost, or are relatively cheap to purchase, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you give your web users a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

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

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

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