Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built site? No matter how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-built website can cost you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your potential buyer sees and this could influence their decision to purchase.

We typically do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse somebody’s site first before buying something in-store or online.

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

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just some of the main design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Design Problems

Typical design problems that can affect your prospect’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you want to use will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated and just plain hard to read text can turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is arranged can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, these problems are related to external things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations in social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. 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 content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing customers. Having features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken graphics beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – 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 site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires modifying web code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we strongly suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WP Themes – Inexpensive Web Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to quickly customize the look of your entire site without affecting the website’s content and changing any of the underlying site functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or can be purchased for a relatively small cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, 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 helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Modular Scalability

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

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up costing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like to add to your site, just install a WP plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful WP plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or that are extremely well priced, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep users returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WordPress web content management platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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