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

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We do things online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse somebody’s web site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Website Design Issues

Common design problems that can influence your potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the color combinations you decide on will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems may be related to external things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all issues are repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete their orders with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that suffers the most because of a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

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

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your customers 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 information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers also. Features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content can be easily found can provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with beautiful images beside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to move quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of existing clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if it requires a lot of code writing.

If you are researching the process of having a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that allow you to quickly modify the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the website’s content and changing any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design like color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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 prospective customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want your site to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your website such as links not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your website 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 goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discount codes, complete their transactions with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can download and easily install on your website at $0 cost, or are relatively cheap to buy and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improving Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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