Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-designed site? A poorly-built web site could cost you prospective buyers and cause more issues than you can imagine.

In a world where attractive design matters, the design of your web site can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your prospective customers see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately move forward with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can affect your potential customer’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Poor color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the colors you choose will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can turn users away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can have an impact impact in the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur loss of customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality issues may include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working all the time. In some cases, problems are related to external things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these features 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 features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction across social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your service information should be easy to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors 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 also existing customers. Having features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages with great images beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you currently have an existing site with design issues that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires a lot of web coding.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to instantly change the look and feel of your entire website with only a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes built for WordPress users available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your site like color, elements like headers and footers, page 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 ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WP content publishing platform is that WordPress gives you expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can cost you prospective buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you need to add to your site, just install a plugin that will help you get the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected on your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several 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 products to a cart, use coupons, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Extend Your Web Site’s Functionality

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your customers.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and functional plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

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

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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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