Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-constructed web site? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-built website can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where appearances matter, the look of your web site can affect the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their decision to purchase from you.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may switch on our mobile phone and go browse somebody’s site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Site Design Issues

Common design issues that can impact your user’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the color combinations you decide on will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can easily turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is laid out can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur potential business opportunity losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your online presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by external factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems get corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors specific functionality, 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 functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to find. Your visitors 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 visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients also. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with eye-popping photos or illustrations beside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps visitors want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like the ability to leave comments, 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 browse quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if what needs doing requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently provide more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to immediately customize the look and feel of your website without touching the website’s content or modifying any core software.

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

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing your website’s design like color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using the WP content publishing software is that WordPress provides site owners with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up costing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WP plugin that does exactly what you need your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole web site has gone 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!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great WP plugins that you can download and install on your website at no cost, or that are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your web users.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow website users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before making 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.

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

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