Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed site? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-constructed web site can lose you many new customers.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design is very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their decision to do business with you.

We mostly do it online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still turn to our smart device and go visit someone’s website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

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

Web Design Issues

Typical design issues that can impact a potential customer’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your 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 help make sure that the colors you decide on will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some 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 as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these problems are caused by factors such as 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 problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

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

Here are just some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your web 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 files to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current customers. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken product images alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps users decide to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – 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 visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As you can see, 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 serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires extensive web code modification.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we highly suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you quickly change the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WP themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design such as color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress provides users with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features.

Earlier in this article we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you potential buyers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that will do what you want your site to do.

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

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that can be downloaded at no cost, or that are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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