Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-built site? A poorly-designed web site could cost you prospective buyers and cause more issues than you could ever wish for.

In a world where appearances matter, the way your web site looks can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your website:

Website Design Issues

Some of the most common design issues that can affect a user’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the colors you select will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly graphic elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is arranged can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other guiding elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Typical functionality issues include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these issues are caused by things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality 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 confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Here are just some of the most common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing customers. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content can be easily found will help provide users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Website – Users want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken product images alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website built or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Flexible Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you instantly customize the look and feel of your entire website without touching the website’s content or modifying any of the underlying site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional themes for WordPress users available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your website like the color, elements like menus and headers, 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 WordPress themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a plugin that will get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your site 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 customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or are relatively cheap and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep visitors returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, your potential clients will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.

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 the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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