Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed web site? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-designed web site could lose you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, the way your web site looks can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your potential clients see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your web site:

Site Design Issues

Typical design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you use will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated or just plain old ugly visual elements can turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience business losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. In some cases, problems may be caused by external things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get problems repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete their transactions using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction on social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your customers 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links that direct visitors to product pages by inserting professionally-taken product pictures with well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like features that let them\visitors 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 users to move quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored 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 compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial 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 website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also your current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this site because you have an existing website with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires extensive code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WP Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you completely modify the look of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

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

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress provides you with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your site like links not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discounts, complete their transactions with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that can be downloaded for free, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins Enhance Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

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

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress website management platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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