Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-constructed web site could cost you many new customers.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a prospective client sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

We mostly do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Web Design Issues

Some common web design problems that can affect a potential customer’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color schemes you use will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can have a significant impact on how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful orientation features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality problems include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these problems 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 remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-built 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 frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are some common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. Your visitors 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. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing clients. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with great product pictures and well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure 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 that your website includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website with design problems that are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if what needs doing requires writing code.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing 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 use WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to instantly change the look and feel of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many of these are either free, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress web site publishing platform is that WordPress provides users with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that will get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected with your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you turn 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 WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of great plugins created for WordPress site owners that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you give your website visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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