Are you losing business because of a poorly-built site? A poorly-built website could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their decision to purchase from you.

We typically do it mostly online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will typically switch to our smart device and go visit somebody’s web site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your web site:

Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can affect a visitor’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you want to use will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally 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.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are related to external things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply coupons, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

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

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

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your service 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing clients. Features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics with well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, 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 be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often ignored 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 that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you have an existing site with design problems that may be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires a lot of web code modification.

If you are considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to instantly change the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the website’s content or modifying any underlying software.

There are thousands of professional looking WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing the design of your site like color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WP web content publishing platform is that WordPress provides users with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up costing you potential clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need to add to your site, just install a plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected on your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discount coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of useful WP plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or you can buy for a relatively reasonable price, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you provide visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow web users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before they make 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 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 using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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