Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-designed web site? No matter how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-designed web site could cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their decision to purchase.

People are turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will typically jump online and go visit somebody’s website first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your web site appear to other people? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s take a look at some key design issues that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can impact a potential customer’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the color schemes you decide on will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by external things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues get corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these features 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 choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where potential buyers suffer most because of a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment in social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common problems that can cause a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your potential customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. 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 information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current customers as well. Having features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages with great product pictures alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps users decide to stick around on your site 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 … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also existing clients too.

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

First, understand that getting problems addressed on an existing website can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to easily customize the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing design settings of your website such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress website management software is that WordPress provides site owners with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could cost you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website such as links not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will 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 on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can download and easily install on your website for free, or that are relatively cheap to buy and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Enhancing Your Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide site users with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses 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, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, 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 website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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