Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built site? No matter how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-built web site could cost you prospective new clients and cause more havoc than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design sells, the way your website looks is very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

We typically mostly do things online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will turn on our mobile device and go browse somebody’s web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to others? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to engage with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Design Problems

Common design issues that can impact a user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the color schemes you decide on will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can have an impact impact in the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working all the time. In some cases, these problems are caused by things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter discounts, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations in social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your site 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. PDF forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing customers. Having features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Customers want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links that direct users to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken product pictures alongside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as features that let them\visitors comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting 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 like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also your current clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to easily customize the look and feel of your site without touching the site’s content and changing the underlying software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress site owners available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with customizable options for changing the design on your website like color, template elements like headers and footers, 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 ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress web site publishing platform is that WordPress provides users with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new features.

Earlier in this article we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WP plugin that does what you need your site to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your site like links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire 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 correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your website 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 products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use discount codes, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of useful WordPress plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Enhance Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you give your website visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. 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 with a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

***

***