Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-built website? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-designed website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design matters, how your web site looks can affect the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We mostly do things online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit a web site before making our next move.

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

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

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

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

Web Design Issues

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

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the color combinations you use will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily turn prospects off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your content is structured can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems include:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are not acceptable in a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems could be related to things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues are fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply coupons, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, the area that suffers most because of a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Typical issues that can lead to 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 hard to find. Your potential 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. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing clients also. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Site – Customers want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages with great graphics with well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps customers decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to 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 … You also want users to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing site with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if it requires modifying code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we strongly suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to quickly change the look and feel of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings of your website like the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature you would like integrated into your site, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you want done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins that you can install on your website for free, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for customers.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow web users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep visitors coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these consumers 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 WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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