Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed site? A poorly-built web site could cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, the look of your website can play a significant role in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a potential buyer sees and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse someone’s web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to visitors? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What your prospective clients 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’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Design Problems

Some of the most common design issues that can impact a user’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the colors you want to use will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose valuable business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable in any website, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems are caused by external things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all problems are addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Some common problems that can cause a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your prospective customers 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. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current customers too. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clean sections where related content is grouped or linked together will provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links which direct users to your product pages by inserting eye-popping photos or illustrations beside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps customers want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage 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 be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a business information 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 risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also your existing clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting code.

If you are in the process of having a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently share more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you quickly modify the look of your entire website without affecting the website’s content and modifying any of the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes built for WordPress available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be purchased quite cheaply, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing the design of your website like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this post we talked about problems in 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 issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you would like to add to your website, just install a plugin that will get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins that you can install on your website at no cost, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improving 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 web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your site visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people returning for more.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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