Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built web site? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-built website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, the look of your web site can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their decision to use your services.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s web site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your website appear to them? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What prospective clients see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

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

Website Design Issues

Some of the most common web design problems that can impact your user’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color schemes you want to use will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have an impact impact in how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues may include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to external factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer the most due to a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to find. Your prospective clients 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing clients too. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Customers want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations beside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, like features that let users comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that 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 pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC 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 website is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also your existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you currently have an existing website with design problems that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires a lot of code writing.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we strongly recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you instantly change the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the website’s content and modifying any of the core software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many themes are either free, or they can be bought relatively inexpensively, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing your website’s design like color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives site owners scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can lose you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your website, just install a WP plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected with your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, complete their purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can install on your website and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Extend Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

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

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