Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built site? No matter how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-constructed web site can lose you potential buyers and cause more problems than you can handle.

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

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can influence your user’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the palettes you want to use will display correctly across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience significant loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality issues include:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. In some cases, problems may be related to external things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, complete their purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are just some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current customers also. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Website – Visitors want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that point to your product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will 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 to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to browse quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential clients that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires extensive coding.

If you are considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing website, then we strongly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to quickly modify the look and feel of your site with only a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professional themes designed for WordPress site owners available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design such as the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you need to integrate into your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you need your site to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your website such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and plugins that allow website visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

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 and engaging user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems 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 WP web site management platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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