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

In a world where appearances matter, how your web site looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will typically jump online and go browse someone’s website before deciding what to do next.

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

What web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design problems that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can impact your prospect’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the color combinations you decide on will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful assistive elements like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since 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 website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, these issues could be related to factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that all problems get addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use discount codes, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where potential customers suffer most due to a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Some common issues that can create a disappointing user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also existing clients. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean sections where your content can be easily found can provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, 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 visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct visitors to product pages with great photos or illustrations with well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps users decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, like the ability to comment on, 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 … You also want users to browse quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make 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 statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of code writing.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to immediately customize the look and feel of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your site like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides you with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.

Earlier we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could lose you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that you want to integrate with your website, just install a WP plugin that will do what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like links not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that can be downloaded and are freely available, 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 WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improve Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for customers.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-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, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, now you have 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 using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

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