Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-constructed website? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-designed web site can lose you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, the design of your web site can be important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their decision to purchase.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go visit someone’s web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Problems

Some of the most common web design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the color schemes you choose will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can turn users away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur significant loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues can include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable for a website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. In some cases, problems are related to external factors 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 attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain 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 customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use coupons, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that users 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 prospective customers but also existing clients. Things such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, 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 web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations with well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps customers decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as features that let users comment on, 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 … 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.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived found this site because you have an existing website with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting problems addressed on an existing website can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires editing code.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Customizable Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you immediately customize the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the website’s content or changing any of the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes created for WordPress users available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or are relatively cheap to buy, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing design settings on your site such as color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

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

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

Earlier we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could lose you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you need done.

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

Need 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 inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins that can be downloaded free of charge, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-constructed 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 kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep people returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or user experience.

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

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