Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built web site? A poorly-built website can end up losing you prospective new customers and a lot of money.

In a world where attractive things matter, the way your web site looks can play a significant role in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will probably fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your digital presence appear to them? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious 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 web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your web site:

Site Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the palettes you decide on will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality issues may include some following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where customers suffer most because of a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

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

Typical issues that can create a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your web visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also existing customers. Features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Website – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links that point to product pages with great images beside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, like the ability to leave comments, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires editing code extensively.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you easily modify the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content or changing any of the core software.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes designed for WordPress users available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited features.

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could lose you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that does what you want done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your site like links not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your site 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 plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins built for WordPress that can be downloaded for free, or that are relatively cheap to buy and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your WP Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you give your customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact 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 visitors returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, they will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and 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 improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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