Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-built web site could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where attractive things matter, the way your web site looks can be very important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will typically turn to our mobile device and go visit somebody’s web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical design problems that can impact a potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you choose will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur potential business losses.

Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. In some cases, these issues could be caused by things 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 you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-designed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your 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 content to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing customers. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will help provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links that direct visitors to your product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations next to well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as features that let users 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 visitors to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website 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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind 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 currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires extensive coding.

If you are considering having a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more in-depth articles 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 use WordPress:

WP Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you quickly modify the look of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings of your site such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides you with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that will get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems on your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, 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 a highly interactive user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these potential customers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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