Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built site? A poorly-constructed web site can end up losing you potential new customers and cause more problems than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your potential buyers see and this could affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically turn to our mobile device and go visit somebody’s website first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can influence your potential customer’s perception about your website 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 ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the colors you choose will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is laid out can affect the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant business opportunity losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems are related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use discount codes, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed website 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 frustrations on social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Some of the more common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include some or all of the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your potential buyers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing clients too. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where your content can be easily found can provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that lead to your product pages by inserting great graphics with well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is providing 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 help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your website 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 ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web coding.

If you are considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you easily modify the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the website’s content or changing any of the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings on your website such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes 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 For Business – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new features.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up costing you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like integrated with your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

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 inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, complete their transactions using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins that can be downloaded and are freely available, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Enhance Your Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep visitors returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will 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, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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