Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-built web site could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit someone’s website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately engage 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:

Web Design Problems

Common design issues that can affect your user’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your website’s 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 palettes you can use to make sure that the palettes you want to use will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can affect the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful orientation features like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose valuable business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems may include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by external things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are just some of the most common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. 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 quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Having features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting beautiful product images next to well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like allowing them to comment on, 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 be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often ignored 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 to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also your existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you quickly customize the look and feel of your site with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing your site’s design like the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives you expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up losing you potential customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you need integrated into your site, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WP 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 website 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 goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great WP plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or that are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WP Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people returning for more.

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, consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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