Are you losing customers because of a poorly-constructed website? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-constructed website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the design of your website is very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitors see and this can affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will probably fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your website appear to others? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the key design problems that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Issues

Common web design issues that can influence your potential customer’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the colors you use will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can easily turn users away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can have an impact effect on how users interact with 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 – As websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues may include:

• Too many errors – 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 on any website, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems are related to things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer the most due to a poorly-constructed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients too. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with eye-catching graphics beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another thing that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like 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 … You also want users to browse quickly around your site 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 ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you currently have an existing site with design issues that could be affecting your business?

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

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Web Design

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

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes designed for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your website’s design settings like color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Plugins – Modular Features

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 WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

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 can cost you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you would like to add to your website, just install a WP plugin that will help you get the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell 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 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 inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great WordPress plugins that you can download and easily install on your website at $0 cost, or that can be purchased relatively cheaply and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

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

As stated earlier, consumers will 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 website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better 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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