Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-built web site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where attractive things matter, your website’s design is very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can influence their decision to use your services.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the colors you select will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily turn prospective clients off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other orientation elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by external factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems get repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter coupons, complete their purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their disappointment on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your potential customers 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 content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing clients as well. Things such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with eye-popping images with well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like 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 … Additionally, you want visitors 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 faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you currently have an existing website with design issues that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take some time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires a lot of code editing.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your site without affecting the site’s content or modifying any of the core site functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking themes designed for WordPress site owners available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up costing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you want integrated with your website, just install a plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site like links not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or are relatively cheap and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you give your website visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep visitors coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using the WP website publishing platform please see our related posts section.

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