Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-constructed web site? A poorly-constructed website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, the look of your website can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a prospective customers see and this could affect their decision to buy your products or use your services.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit a web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web site appear to online users? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your site:

Website Design Issues

Typical design problems that can impact your visitor’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the palettes you select will display consistently across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can have a significant impact in how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other guiding elements such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As online information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Some common functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for any website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working at all times. In some cases, problems are related to things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, use discount coupons, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer most because of a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Common problems that can create a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your prospective customers 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 visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients too. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean areas where related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken product pictures and well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps users decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as 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 browse quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Website – 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 web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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 is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also current clients too.

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

First, understand that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Website Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to easily change the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the site’s content or modifying any of the core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could lose you potential buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature you would like integrated into your website, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are WP 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 website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful WP plugins that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or you can purchase for a reasonable price, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

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

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website or user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP CMS platform please see our related posts section.

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