Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-built web site? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-constructed web site could end up costing you prospective new customers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where looks matter, the design of your website is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit a website before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your website appear to online users? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What potential clients see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Design Problems

Common design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the color combinations you use will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can easily turn prospective clients away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful assistive elements such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Some common functionality issues can include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems could be caused by factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter discounts, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can cause a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective clients 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.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers also. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations beside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as the ability to comment on, 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 browse quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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 isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if it requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress platform on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Customizable Website Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that enable you to immediately change the look and feel of your entire website without touching the website’s content and changing the underlying site functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress site owners available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP web content publishing software is that WordPress gives you powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could cost you potential clients.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like integrated into your website, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected with your site like links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discounts, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that can be downloaded at no cost, or can be bought relatively cheaply and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

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

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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