Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-built web site? A poorly-constructed web site can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, the design of your website can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We do it mostly online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit a site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What your potential clients see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your site:

Site Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can impact your potential customer’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the color combinations you want to use will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain ugly graphic elements can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur business losses.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent errors are not acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your web presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are working all the time. In some cases, problems may be related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your site 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. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current clients too. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight links that point to product pages with eye-catching photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another area that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site 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 users to move quickly around your website and access your data 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 neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial 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 web site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also current clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if the work requires changing a lot of code.

If you are considering getting a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that allow you to quickly customize the look of your site without touching the website’s content and changing any of the core software.

There are thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress content management software is that WordPress provides website owners with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up losing you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you want integrated into your site, just install a plugin that will do what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are 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 plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete their transactions using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful WP plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or that are relatively cheap to purchase and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Expand Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

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

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

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, your prospective clients 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 web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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