Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-built web site can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where first impressions matter, the way your website looks is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit somebody’s website first before buying products in-store or online.

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

What your prospective customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

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

Web Design Problems

Typical web design issues that can affect a visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the colors you decide on will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is structured can significantly impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business losses.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality issues include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these problems may be related to factors such as your 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 all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common issues that can lead to a disappointing user experience can include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your service information should not be kept in obscure corners. Your visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current customers too. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content is grouped or linked together will provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links that point to your product pages with eye-catching product images beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps customers want to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most 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 business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

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

Now … what if you have arrived on this site because you have an existing site with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires writing code.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you completely modify the look of your site with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing design settings on your site like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress provides users with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can cost you prospective clients.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that you want to add to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

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

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

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

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

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and immediate user experience that will keep users coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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