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

In a world where beautiful design matters, how your website looks is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitors see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically switch to our mobile device and go visit somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

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

Site Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can influence your potential customer’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the color combinations you decide on will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually boring, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful orientation features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business opportunity losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems could be related to external things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply coupons, complete their transactions using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment across social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your potential clients 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. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing clients. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content can be easily found can help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Features – Users want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct users to your product pages by inserting beautiful images with well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps users want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability 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 users to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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 website is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also existing clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if what needs doing requires editing web code extensively.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share more articles about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to easily change the look and feel of your entire website without touching the site’s content and modifying the underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, 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 ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Expansion

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

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can end up costing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that you need integrated with your website, just install a WP plugin that will do what you want done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website such as links not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t showing 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 problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products 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 coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins created for WordPress that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that you can purchase for a reasonable cost and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Enhance Your Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and 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-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep visitors returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site 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 our related posts section.

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