Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-built website could lose you prospective buyers and cause more issues than you can handle.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the look of your website can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this can affect their decision to buy your products or use your services.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we still switch on our smart device and go visit somebody’s web site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web site appear to others? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your site:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common design issues that can affect a potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the colors you want to use will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is laid out can have a significant impact on the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other guiding elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As business information is 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 incur business opportunity losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems may include:

• Subpar functionality – 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 showing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get problems corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use coupons, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where customers suffer the most because of a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Typical issues that can lead to a disappointing user experience can include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your prospective buyers 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. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current customers. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting great graphics with well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also your existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing website with design problems that may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if it requires rewriting web code extensively.

If you are in the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that enable you to quickly modify the look of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design such as color, template elements like menus and headers, 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 works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP web site management platform is that WordPress provides you with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited features.

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up costing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature you need integrated into your site, just install a WordPress plugin that gets what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need 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 plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that you can download and easily install on your website at $0 cost, or are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improving Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your customers.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and 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-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues 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 or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

***

***