Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-built website? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-designed website can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, how your web site looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their decision to buy your products and use your services.

We mostly do things online. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your website appear to others? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately engage with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Design Problems

Common web design issues that can influence a user’s perception about your site include 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 select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the palettes you use will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain old ugly graphic elements can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since 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 website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems can include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your web presence reflects your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running at all times. In some cases, these problems may be related to factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems are corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products 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, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

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

Common issues that can create a bad user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing customers also. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct visitors to product pages with beautiful graphics next to well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as the ability 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 through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively 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 customers but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires writing code.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to immediately customize the look and feel of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either free, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design such as color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier in this article we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can end up costing you potential buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature that you need to integrate into your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site like links not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire website is 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 site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your website for free, or that are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, they will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, this post 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 please see other posts we have published on this site.

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