Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the look of your web site can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your web visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit a website first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What web visitors 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’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you select will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can affect the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose valuable business opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, problems are related to factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Some common problems that can lead to a disappointing user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current customers as well. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting eye-catching graphics alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to 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 users to move quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors 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 and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also your current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to easily modify the look of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional themes built for WordPress users available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Modular Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives users scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new features or functionality.

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

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you want your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site such as links not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire website is 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 site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several 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, apply coupons, complete their transactions using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can install on your website and are freely available, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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