Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed site? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-constructed web site can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where first impressions matter, your website’s design can be important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your prospective customer sees and this could influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we may switch on our mobile phone and go browse a web site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to them? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately move forward with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Site Design Issues

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

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and 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 where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur potential business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems may include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working at all times. Sometimes, problems could be caused by external things like your 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 offers visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, complete their orders with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Typical problems that can lead to a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. 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 quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers as well. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Features – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages with eye-popping product pictures next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as features that let them\visitors comment on, 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 users to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also existing clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you currently have an existing website with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if the work requires extensive web development.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to completely change the look of your site without affecting the site’s content and modifying the underlying software.

There are thousands of great-looking themes created for WordPress users available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your site like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this post we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you need to integrate with your website, just install a WP plugin that will get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that you can install on your site at $0 cost, or are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Enhancing Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your web users.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep users coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have 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 the WordPress platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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