Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed website? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built website can cost you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design matters, the way your web site looks can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their decision to use your services.

People are turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still switch to our smart device and go browse someone’s website first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

What your prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s take a look at some key design issues that can affect your web site:

Site Design Issues

Typical design issues that can influence your user’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the colors you choose will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain old ugly graphic elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is arranged can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other orientation features like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Some common functionality issues may include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on any website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these problems could be related to things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common issues that can lead to a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your site visitors 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 files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current clients also. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links that direct customers to product pages with eye-popping photos or illustrations with well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another area that helps users want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to leave comments, 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 visitors to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also your current clients too.

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

First, understand that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently 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 redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you quickly customize the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or can be purchased quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing the design on your website like the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

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

Earlier in this post we talked about areas 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 problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you want to integrate with your website, just install a plugin that does what you want done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins for WordPress site owners that you can download and easily install on your site at no cost, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Capability

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these potential customers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

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 using the WP content publishing software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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