Are you losing business because of a poorly-built site? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-constructed website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, how your web site looks is becoming more important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this can influence their decision to purchase.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just doing preliminary research, we will probably fire up our laptop and go visit a website before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to them? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

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

Site Design Problems

Some common design problems that can impact your potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the color combinations you use will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other assistive features such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues can include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on any website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems could be related to factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all issues get corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users 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 choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their disappointment on social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Here are some of the most common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your 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 content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current clients. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which lead to product pages with eye-catching product pictures alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another aspect that helps users decide to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your customers, like allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires editing code.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that allow you to instantly modify the look of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes designed for WordPress site owners available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be purchased quite cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your website like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

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

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

Earlier we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up losing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that you need to add to your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins that can be downloaded at no cost, or you can buy for a inexpensive cost, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, they will simply move on to another business with a better website.

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

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