Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-designed website could end up losing you prospective new customers and cause more turmoil than you can handle.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective clients see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

We do it online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will switch on our smart phone and go browse someone’s site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to other people? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What prospective 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 things than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

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

Web Design Problems

Some common web design issues that can influence your visitor’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the palettes you select will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues may include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are not acceptable for any website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your online presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. In some cases, 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 you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing customers. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean sections where your content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages by inserting great images beside well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another area that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage users, such as features that let users leave comments, 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 browse quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also your existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code modification.

If you are considering getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you quickly modify the look of your site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can cost you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you would like to add to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

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 inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of great WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep visitors returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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