Are you losing business because of a poorly-built site? A poorly-built website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, your website’s design can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitor sees and this can influence their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your website appear to online users? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Website Design Issues

Common design problems that can affect your prospect’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the palettes you use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated and just plain hard to read text can easily turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential business opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems may include:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems could be related to factors 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 you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical issues that can cause a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing clients. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with great graphics and well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps users decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages 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 make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you easily modify the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Expansion

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features or functionality.

Earlier in this article we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can end up losing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you need to add to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you want done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that can be purchased for a small cost and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you give your customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow site users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

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 and user experience.

Hopefully, this information 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 using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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