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

In a world where beautiful design matters, the design of your website can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your potential customer sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We typically do it mostly online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit someone’s web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Website?

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

Web Design Issues

Typical design problems that can impact your user’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly graphic elements can easily turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is laid out can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential customers.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality problems include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable on any website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain working all the time. In some cases, problems could be related to external 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 all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discount codes, complete their transactions using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations in social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some of the more common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things 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 files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing clients also. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content can be easily found will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Customers want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To achieve 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 point to your product pages with beautiful photos or illustrations beside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, like the ability 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliant Site – 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 prospective buyers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also some of existing 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, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if it requires extensive coding.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Instant Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that let you immediately change the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes created for WordPress available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many themes are either free, or they can be bought quite cheaply, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing the design of your site like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Features

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

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

Earlier in this article we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up losing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a plugin that will help you get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want 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 and easy-to-use WP 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 products to a shopping cart, use discount codes, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress site owners that you can install on your website at $0 cost, or are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Improve Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you provide your visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, your prospective buyers will simply move on to another business with a better website and website experience.

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

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