Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built web site? A poorly-constructed website can lose you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this could affect their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go browse a website before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

What your 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’ experience and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Web Design Problems

Typical design issues that can impact a prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your content is laid out can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience loss of customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your online presence reflects your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, these problems are caused by external factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues get repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction across social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Some common issues that can cause a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients too. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with great product images next to well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website 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 within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if the work requires writing code.

If you are considering getting a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Customizable Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to quickly change the look and feel of your website with just a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or can be purchased for a relatively reasonable price, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing your website’s design settings like color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP Themes – An Overview

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new features or functionality.

Earlier we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can cost you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you want done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily 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 WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins designed for WordPress users that you can install on your website free of charge, or that are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Enhance Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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