Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built web site? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-designed web site could lose you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web site appear to online users? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What your prospective customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can influence a prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain old ugly images can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality issues include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems may be related to factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues are addressed 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 online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, complete their purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Typical problems that can lead to a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for 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 users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current clients also. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. 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 hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting beautiful product images and well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, like allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to browse quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of current clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived on our site because you currently have an existing website with design issues that are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Customizable Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you instantly modify the look and feel of your website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing your site’s design such as the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could cost you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you need integrated into your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems on your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

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

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress that you can install on your site free of charge, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Expanding Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them 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 build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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