Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where looks matter, how your web site looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will turn on our smart phone and go browse somebody’s web site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your web site appear to others? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Site Design Problems

Some of the most common design problems that can influence a user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the color schemes you choose will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other assistive features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience potential business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues may include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable in a website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems are caused by factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, 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 site offers visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, the area that most suffers 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 visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations on social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are some of the more common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your customers 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current customers too. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. 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 that direct customers to product pages by inserting beautiful images and well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as features that let them\visitors comment on, 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 move quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your 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 policy, terms 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 negatively impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you currently have an existing website with design issues 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 currently operate, especially if the work requires writing code.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot 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 – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you immediately change the look of your entire site without touching the site’s content or changing any core site functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your website such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress content publishing platform is that WordPress gives users expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature you want to integrate with your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want 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 on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be downloaded and are freely available, or that you can buy quite inexpensively, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Expand Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays 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, they will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress web site management software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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