Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, how your website looks is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your digital presence appear to others? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site:

Site Design Issues

Common design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can easily turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues can include some or all of the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to external things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-constructed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction on social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Here are just some of the most common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your potential 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. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current customers also. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting eye-popping graphics alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another area that helps customers decide to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, like the ability to leave comments, 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 be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web 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 of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also some of existing customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on this site because you currently have an existing site with design problems that may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires modifying code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you easily customize the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap to buy, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives website owners modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could cost you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you need integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you want done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress users that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or you can purchase for a inexpensive price, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses 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 rich user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

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

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