Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed web site? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-built website could cost you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, how your website looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

What your potential buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately move forward with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical design issues that can influence your user’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the colors you use will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website.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 your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your web presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these problems may be caused by things such as your web 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 as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discount codes, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your prospective 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 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 site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current customers too. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where your content is grouped or linked together will provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations alongside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as features that let them\visitors 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to browse quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored 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 company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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 is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing site with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires extensive code editing.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you quickly change the look and feel of your site without touching the site’s content or changing any underlying software functionality.

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

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing the design of your website like color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

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

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

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can lose you prospective buyers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that are missing 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 problems 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

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

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Expand Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, 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 website users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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