Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-built website? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site could lose you prospective new clients and cause more havoc than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive 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 prospective client sees and this could influence their decision to purchase from you.

We do it mostly online. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse somebody’s web site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

What web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Poor color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the palettes you decide on will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain ugly visual elements can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can have a significant impact in how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other orientation elements such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur potential business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Some common functionality problems include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these problems are caused by factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems get repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want 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, apply discounts, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction in social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common issues that can create a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your 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 users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing clients. Features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean areas where related content can be easily found can provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links that direct customers to product pages by inserting eye-popping graphics next to well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another thing that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, 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 visitors to browse quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure 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 that your site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website 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 website is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients 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 you feel are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web coding.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you instantly modify the look of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or 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 users with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design like the color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

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

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

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up costing you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you would like integrated with your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your site 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 online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins built for WordPress that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for visitors.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow website 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 very rich and interactive user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

***

***