Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-designed site? A poorly-constructed website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, how your website looks can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitors see and this could influence their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go visit someone’s web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your site:

Website Design Problems

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

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the color schemes you decide on will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can easily turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other guiding features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur loss of customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, these problems are caused by external things like 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 immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities 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 features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter discounts, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective buyers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. 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 information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing customers. Having features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean sections where related content can be easily found will help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting great graphics next to well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another area that helps visitors decide to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, like allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support 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 within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site 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 site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also some of existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site with design problems that are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are researching the process of getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently provide more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you completely modify the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes built for WordPress users available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress – Modular Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality you want to add to your site, just install a plugin that will do what you want your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site such as links not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discount codes, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Expand Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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