Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-built site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, the way your web site looks is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this could influence their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Here are just some of the key design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Web Design Issues

Typical design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you want to use will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website.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 your pages are arranged can have an impact effect on the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful orientation elements like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for a website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working at all times. Sometimes, these problems could be caused by external factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get problems corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

Common problems that can cause a bad user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. 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 information 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 cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing customers. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that point to your product pages with professionally-taken photos or illustrations with well-written descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps customers want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like features that let them\visitors leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business 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 like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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

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

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if the work requires modifying code.

If you are considering getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we strongly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Instant Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you instantly change the look and feel of your site in minutes.

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

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing design settings of your site such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Powerful Features

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could lose you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature you want integrated with your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or that are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays 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, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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