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

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your website looks can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective customer sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

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

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately move forward with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site:

Site Design Issues

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

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the color schemes you choose will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is arranged can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose valuable customers.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems are caused by things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all problems get repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, complete their purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your visitors 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 users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing customers. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which point to product pages with professionally-taken product pictures with well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, like features that let users comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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 isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your current customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if it requires editing code.

If you are considering having a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you quickly change the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing the design of your website such as color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could lose you potential customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a plugin that does what you want your website to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire 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!

Need 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 and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins created for WordPress users that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that can be bought quite cheaply and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

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

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these prospective buyers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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