Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-built site? A poorly-constructed web site could cost you prospective buyers and cause more havoc than you could ever wish for.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design can play a significant part in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a prospective buyers see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to others? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site:

Website Design Issues

Some common web design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the palettes you want to use will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can have a significant impact on the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, 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 therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems may be related to things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some common problems that can lead to a disappointing user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. 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. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current customers. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content can be easily found will provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which lead to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics with well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as features that let users 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 website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your potential clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if the work requires extensive web coding.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing website, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to easily change the look of your entire website without touching the site’s content or modifying the underlying software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional WP themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress provides website owners with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited functionality.

Earlier we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can lose you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that you want integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire site has gone 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 site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can install on your site at $0 cost, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

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

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep visitors returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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