Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-built website? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-built website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, your website’s design is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your web visitors see and this could affect their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit a web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your website appear to them? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

What your customers 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 visitors’ perceptions and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Issues

Common web design problems that can impact your visitor’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the color schemes you use will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur significant loss of customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your web presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all problems get fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical problems that can lead to a bad user experience can include some of following:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your prospective customers 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. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing customers too. Having features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Website – Visitors want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken images and well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them to comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also some of current clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing site, then we highly suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to completely customize the look of your entire site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress site owners available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your site’s design like the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To WordPress Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

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

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 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 customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Enhancing Your Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your web users.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. 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 and website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you 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 click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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