Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-constructed website can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, the way your website looks can be very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective buyers see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Here are just some of the main design issues that can affect your site:

Web Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can impact a prospect’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the colors you select will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful guiding elements such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent errors are not acceptable in a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working at all times. In some cases, these issues are caused by external things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some of the more common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. 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 information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing clients. Having features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content is grouped or linked together will provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which direct customers to product pages with professionally-taken photos or illustrations with well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them to comment on, 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 … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also some of existing customers too.

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

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

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to instantly change the look and feel of your site without touching the site’s content and changing the core software functionality.

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

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design like the color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Features

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could lose you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a WP plugin that will do what you want done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want 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 plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter discounts, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

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

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Extend Your Website’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you give visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you 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 the WordPress software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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