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

In a world where first impressions matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively switch to our smart device and go browse someone’s site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

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

Website Design Issues

Typical design issues that can impact your visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your 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 colors to ensure that the colors you want to use will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn prospects away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by 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 work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in any website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these issues are related to factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services 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, complete their transactions with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can create a poor user experience can include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current customers also. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Users want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links that lead to your product pages with great product pictures alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like features that let them\visitors 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 … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take time and can end up being somewhat 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 considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing site, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your entire site without touching the site’s content and changing any of the underlying site functionality.

There are thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress site owners available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be purchased relatively inexpensively, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

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

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

WordPress Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides site owners with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need to add to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website such as links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete their transactions with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that you can download and easily install on your site at no cost, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before they make a purchasing decision. 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 or better website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP software please see our related posts section.

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