Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-constructed website can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive things matter, the way your web site looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively turn to our mobile phone and go visit a web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your website appear to other people? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to buy from you.

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

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

Web Site Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can affect a prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the palettes you use will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is arranged can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems may include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable in a website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems are caused by external things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction across social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Typical issues that can lead to a bad user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current clients too. Having features like descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links that direct customers to product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another thing that helps customers decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like features that let them\visitors 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 visitors to move quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – 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 web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site 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 website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also some of existing customers too.

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

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

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more information about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to completely change the look of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professional looking WP themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design settings such as color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress web content management software is that WordPress provides you with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this article we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your website like links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of great WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your website at no cost, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this post 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 the WP website publishing platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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