Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-constructed website could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective clients see and this could affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse somebody’s web site before making our next move.

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

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

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

Website Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can impact your prospect’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the palettes you select will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain old ugly images can turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have a significant effect on the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience potential business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Some common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these problems may be related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get problems corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter discounts, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where potential buyers suffer most because of a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations on social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to find. Your prospective 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. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also existing clients. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting beautiful product images beside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, like features that let users 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 navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived on this site 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 end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires rewriting web code extensively.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to immediately modify the look and feel of your website with only a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or can be bought relatively inexpensively, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing the design of your site like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this article we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a WP plugin that will do what you need to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire site 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 turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter discounts, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or can be bought for a relatively small cost, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide your visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.

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

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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