Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed web site? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-designed web site could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your web site looks is very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a potential buyers see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

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

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your website appear to other people? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

What customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Design Problems

Some of the most common web design issues that can impact a user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using 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 decide on will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated and just plain ugly visual elements can turn visitors away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other assistive elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems can include the following:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable on any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. In some cases, these problems are caused by external 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 all problems get repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are just some common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers also. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found will help provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need 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 images with well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as the ability to leave comments, 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 … Additionally, you want users to move quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored 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 that your site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also your existing 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, be aware that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code modification.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Flexible Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to easily customize the look and feel of your website with just a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing your site’s design such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are 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.

You can learn about themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Features

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives you scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could lose you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that you would like integrated with your website, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert 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 website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins that you can download and install on your website and are freely available, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow site visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep visitors returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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