Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed website? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-designed web site could cost you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your web site looks can be very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective customers see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

We do it mostly online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit a web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your website appear to others? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

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

Site Design Problems

Some common design issues that can affect a prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the palettes you want to use will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain ugly visual elements can result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your content is structured can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems can include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are not acceptable in a website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working all the time. In some cases, these issues could be related to factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discounts, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction across social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common issues that can lead to a poor user experience can include some of following:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your prospective customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing customers. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Users want sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with great images alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to move quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting issues fixed on an existing site 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 rewriting web code.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you instantly modify the look of your entire website with just a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress site owners available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives users almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

Earlier in this post we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could cost you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like to integrate into your site, just install a WP plugin that will get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected with your site like links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress site owners that you can download and install on your website at no cost, or can be bought for a relatively reasonable cost, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you give customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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