Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-built site? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-built web site could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can play a significant role in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective customers see and this can affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your website:

Web Design Issues

Some common design problems that can affect a user’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the palettes you decide on will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your page content is laid out can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful assistive elements such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these issues are caused by things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, apply discount coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment on social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your prospective clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. 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 website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers also. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where your content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Features – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that point to product pages by inserting eye-catching photos or illustrations and well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as the ability to 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 around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, 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 negatively impact your business success online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are researching the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to easily modify the look and feel of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

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

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides you with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this post we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can cost you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality you would like integrated with your site, just install a plugin that does what you want your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins designed for WordPress that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Expand Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you provide your visitors 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 contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website and better website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WP software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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