Are you losing business because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-built web site could end up losing you potential new customers and cause more problems than you can imagine.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the look of your web site can affect your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective clients see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically switch on our mobile phone and go browse somebody’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

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

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the color schemes you choose will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated and just plain old ugly images can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some common functionality problems can include:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems are caused by things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are some of the most common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your potential buyers 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current customers. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will help provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links which direct customers to product pages by inserting beautiful images beside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let users 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 browse quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed 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 doing business with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your company is 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, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you immediately change the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the site’s content or modifying any of the underlying software functionality.

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

(WordPress Themes)

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

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WP Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up costing you potential clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Improve Your Website’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow web users to connect, 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 a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your prospective buyers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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