Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed site? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed website could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where attractive things matter, your website’s design can be very important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitors see and this could affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will typically jump online and go visit a website before making our next move.

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

What prospective buyers 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 factors than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s review some of the main design issues that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Website Design Problems

Some common design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the color combinations you want to use will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can have an impact effect on the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Frequent errors are not acceptable for any website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these problems are caused by 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 you get problems addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where potential customers suffer most due to a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing customers. Having features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content can be easily found can help provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links that lead to your product pages with eye-popping graphics beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps customers want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let users comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – 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 visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website 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 site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if it requires rewriting code.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WP Themes – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to completely customize the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be bought for a relatively small cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design such as 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 achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up costing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you want your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site such as links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress that you can download and install on your website for free, or that can be purchased relatively inexpensively and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

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

WordPress – An Interactive 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 beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them coming back to your site.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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