Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-built website could lose you potential buyers and cause more havoc than you can imagine.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the way your web site looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

What prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Design Issues

Typical design issues that can impact a potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the palettes you use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can easily turn visitors away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is arranged can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems may include:

• Persistent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website reflects your company. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues could be caused by factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use coupons, order with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer most because of a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Some of the more common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your potential clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing customers too. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clean areas where your content can be easily found will provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links that point to product pages by inserting eye-catching images beside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like allowing them 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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 website is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires modifying code.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that allow you to immediately customize the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content and modifying the core software.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be bought for a relatively reasonable cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides users with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier we talked about issues 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 would like integrated into your website, just install a plugin that will do what you need your site to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

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

And just like themes, there are thousands of great plugins designed for WordPress that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

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

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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