Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-constructed site? A poorly-designed web site could cost you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can be very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit a web site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to them? 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 your 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 web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

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

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Issues

Common web design problems that can influence your potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the colors you want to use will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is arranged can have a significant effect on how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As online information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable for a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these problems are related to factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems are corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount codes, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment on social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. 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 users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing customers. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content can be easily found can provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, like allowing them to leave comments, 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 site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of existing clients as well.

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

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

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we highly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to instantly modify the look of your site without touching the website’s content or changing the underlying software functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking WP themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or can be purchased for a relatively small price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with customizable options for changing the design on your site such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you want integrated into your site, just install a plugin that will get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site such as links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that can be bought relatively inexpensively, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With WordPress Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow web users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep people returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have 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 please see our related posts section.

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