Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-built website can end up costing you prospective new customers and cause more turmoil than you can handle.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the design of your website can be very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can influence their decision to purchase.

We do things online. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we will typically switch on our mobile phone and go visit someone’s web site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

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

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can affect a visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful orientation elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As online information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur significant business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your online presence reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues could be caused by factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, purchase using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Here are some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your prospective buyers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that users 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 prospective buyers but existing clients too. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Users want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting beautiful images beside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like the ability to 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 visitors to move quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting 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 business contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also your existing clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we strongly suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can 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 seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you immediately customize the look and feel of your entire site without touching the website’s content or changing the underlying software.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress users available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design like color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

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

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this post we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up losing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you would like to add to your site, just install a WP plugin that will get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great WordPress plugins that you can download and install on your website free of charge, or that are relatively cheap to purchase, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and website 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 WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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