Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-constructed web site? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-built website could cost you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, your website’s design can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a potential buyers see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your digital presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Website Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can affect a visitor’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the color combinations you decide on will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain old ugly images can turn visitors away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can have a significant impact in how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your web presence reflects your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems are corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discount coupons, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their frustrations on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Typical problems that can cause a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing customers. Having features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that point to your product pages by inserting beautiful images alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as the ability to 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 … You also want visitors to browse quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and 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 potential paying customers but also current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived on this website because you have an existing website with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we highly recommend that you consider using the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Flexible Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to instantly customize the look and feel of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or they can be purchased relatively cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing design settings on your site such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers, 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 helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

WordPress – Modular Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up losing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a plugin that will get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire web site is 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 transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or that can be purchased quite inexpensively and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With WP Plugins

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and immediate user experience that will keep them returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, 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 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 expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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