Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed site? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we still switch on our smart device and go visit someone’s website first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your website appear to others? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to move forward with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design issues that can affect your site:

Web Design Issues

Typical design issues that can influence a potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the color combinations you select will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Some common functionality problems include the following:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable in a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running 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 ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer most because of a poorly-built site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations across social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your 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. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current clients also. Things such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting eye-popping product images beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect 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 staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential clients that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires changing a lot of code.

If you are considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share more posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to quickly change the look of your entire site with only a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or they can be bought for a relatively small cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings like color, template elements like menus and headers, page 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 works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

WP Plugins – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress website publishing software is that WordPress provides users with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited additional functionality.

Earlier in this article we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could cost you business.

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

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your website such as links not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful WordPress plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Expand Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of 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 user experience that will keep users returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these prospective buyers will simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.

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 WP content management platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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