Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-built web site? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-built web site can end up losing you potential new customers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitor sees and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically jump online and go browse somebody’s website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your website appear to other people? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Issues

Some common design problems that can affect a user’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated or just plain old ugly images can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site.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 overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is arranged can have an impact effect on the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues may include some or all of the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on a website, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these issues could be caused by factors like your 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 business provides visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your customers 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. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients as well. Features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Website – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that point to product pages by inserting eye-catching graphics beside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, like allowing them to comment on, 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 users to move quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your existing clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if it requires editing code.

If you are considering getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that let you quickly modify the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional themes for WordPress site owners available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, elements like menus and headers, page 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 works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives users scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this post we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up losing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a plugin that will do what you need your site to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need 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 and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With WP Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep users 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 the customer in mind, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

***

***