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

In a world where beautiful design sells, the look of your web site can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a visitors see and this could affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse somebody’s site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to online users? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately move forward with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

Here are just some of the main design problems that can affect your website:

Web Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can influence your prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the color schemes you select will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are laid out can have a significant impact in the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential customers.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to external factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

Some common issues that can create a bad user experience can include some or all of the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with eye-popping graphics with well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as the ability to leave comments, 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also current clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing web site, then we highly recommend that you consider using the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish more posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress platform on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to immediately modify the look of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WP website management platform is that WordPress gives users expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we discussed problems 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. If there is a functionality that you would like to integrate with your site, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your website like links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know 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 WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great WP plugins that can be downloaded for free, or are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Web Site With WP Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you provide customers with a great user experience.

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

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues 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 WP platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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