Are you losing customers because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-constructed website could cost you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your web site looks can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse someone’s website first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to others? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

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

Website Design Issues

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

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the colors you choose will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can have an impact impact on the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in a website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these issues could be related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical problems that can lead to a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current clients also. Having features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where your content can be easily found will provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links that lead to product pages with eye-catching graphics with well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to move quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your potential clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of current clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing website can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires rewriting code.

If you are researching the process of getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing site, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Flexible Website Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to quickly change the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing design settings of your site such as color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

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

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

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that you would like integrated into your website, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your site 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 products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins created for WordPress that you can install on your site at no cost, or that are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-designed website, 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 connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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