Are you losing customers because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-built website could end up losing you potential new clients and a lot of money.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, the look of your website can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

We typically do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will switch on our mobile phone and go visit somebody’s site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web site appear to online users? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Site Design Issues

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

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the color schemes you decide on will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can have a significant impact in the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed through a range of 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 fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable customers.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your web presence reflects your company. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, these issues may be caused by external factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, purchase 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-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their frustrations across social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common issues that can lead to a disappointing user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which lead to your product pages with eye-catching graphics and well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps users decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, 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 prospective clients but also some of current clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if it requires modifying web code extensively.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share more articles about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Customizable Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you completely modify the look and feel of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your site such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

WP Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this article we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you want integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that gets the job done.

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

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive 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 select and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your website at no cost, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you provide your visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs 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 and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers 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, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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