Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-built website can lose you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, the design of your web site can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We typically do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit somebody’s site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web presence appear to them? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to move forward with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can impact a prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the color schemes you select will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn prospects away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is structured can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant loss of customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality issues include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your online presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues could be caused by factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get issues repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Typical issues that can cause a bad user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your prospective customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing clients too. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content is grouped or linked together will provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct users to product pages by inserting eye-catching images and well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another aspect that helps users decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as the ability 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident 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 like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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 constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on this site because you currently have an existing site 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 end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you quickly modify the look of your entire website without touching the site’s content or changing any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes built for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Basic Guide To WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up costing you prospective clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you want to integrate with your website, just install a WP plugin that will help you get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your website such as links not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your website 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 features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that you can install on your website free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

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

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

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