Are you losing business because of a poorly-built site? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-built web site can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your website looks can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is the first thing that your web visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

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

What web visitors 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 influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the key design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Issues

Common web design issues that can impact your prospect’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color schemes you select will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain ugly visual elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can have a significant impact in how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant business losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are not acceptable on any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your online presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are related to external factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discounts, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your product information should not be kept in obscure areas. 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing clients as well. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Customers want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which lead to product pages with beautiful product pictures alongside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like features that let users leave comments, 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 … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of current clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires editing web code extensively.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share more posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Instant Web Design

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

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design settings like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited features.

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website like links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site has gone 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 let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discount codes, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are relatively cheap to buy and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your WP Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before making 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 offer them a better website and better user 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 using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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