Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-built site? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-built website can end up costing you prospective new clients and cause more havoc than you can imagine.

In a world where first impressions matter, the way your web site looks is very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this can affect their decision to purchase from you.

We do things online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web presence appear to online users? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to purchase from you.

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

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the palettes you select will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have an impact effect on the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other orientation elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working all the time. In some cases, these problems may be related to factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get issues corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discount coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

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

Typical problems that can lead to a bad user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. Your prospective clients want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also current customers. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where related content can be easily found can help provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with great photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as allowing them to leave comments, 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 move quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if it requires extensive web development.

If you are researching the process of getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Flexible Website Design

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

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be purchased relatively inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are fully responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could cost you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need your site to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert 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 take immediate corrective action!

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 WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or you can buy relatively cheaply, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, 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 user experience, they will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP CMS software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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