Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-constructed web site? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed website can end up costing you prospective buyers and important sales.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit a website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to others? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

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

Site Design Problems

Some of the most common design problems that can influence your potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is structured can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience potential business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable in any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your online presence reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, these issues are caused by factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, complete their transactions using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their disappointment across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Common issues that can cause a disappointing user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your product information should not be kept in obscure places. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current customers too. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Users stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages by inserting great photos or illustrations next to well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as features that let them\visitors 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 users to browse quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website 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 website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you currently have an existing site with design issues that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to instantly customize the look of your site without touching the site’s content or changing any of the underlying software.

There are thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings on your website like the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Scalability

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

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

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could cost you potential buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that will help you get the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that you can download and install on your website at $0 cost, or are relatively cheap to purchase, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Enhance Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and plugins that allow web visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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