Can WordPress fix a poorly built website? Does it even matter. Ask yourself, are you missing out on business, and thereby losing money, because of poor website design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly designed website could lose you valuable credibility and result in significant business loss. Your WordPress website should be the foundation for your online presence. Learn how to do it right.
How Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Website?
In a world where attractive design matters, how your website is seen by your sit visitors is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees when finding you online. Their initial perception could affect their purchasing decision.
People are now turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if we're only doing preliminary research, we still switch on our mobile phone and go browse someone's web site first before purchasing products in-store or online.
Now, try to see things from your prospect's viewpoint. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?
The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors' perceptions and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.
Let's review a few key design issues that can affect your website's results:
Web Design Problems
Common design issues that can influence a visitor's perception about your website include the following:
- Color - Unattractive color combinations affect your site's results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the palettes you decide on will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
- Design Elements - Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
- Layout - The way your pages are structured can have a significant impact in the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links and other objects.
- Responsiveness - As information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it's important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers and platforms, you will experience loss of customers.
Site Functionality Issues
Typical website functionality issues can include:
- Sub-par Performance - A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don't work, videos don't play and graphics are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable in a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your online presence reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos and images remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems may be related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it's important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
- Feature limitations - If your website provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.
Poor User Experience
Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed website is the "user experience".
A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their disappointment on social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ....
Here are just some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:
- Ease Of Use - Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
- Organized - If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing clients as well. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good user experience.
- Stimulating Web Site - Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links that point to your product pages by inserting eye-catching graphics beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
- User Interactivity - Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as the ability 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 be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
- Trustworthy Site - One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting 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 business contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.
As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers, but also current clients too.
Now, what if you have arrived found this information because you currently have an existing site with design issues that could be affecting your business?
First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of coding.
If you are considering getting a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we strongly suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress website publishing platform.
We plan to share 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 choose WordPress:
WP Themes - Unique Web Design Features
WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you completely change the look of your site with only a few mouse clicks.
There are thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing your site's design like color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.
WP Plugins - Powerful Expansion
Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides you with expandable features through add-on applications called "plugins."
WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.
Earlier in this article we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can lose you potential clients.
WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality you need to integrate with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that does what you need to get things done.
Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site such as links not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems ... there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!
Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.
And just like WP themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.
You can learn more about plugins HERE.
WordPress - An Enhanced User Experience
In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for visitors.
WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep people returning again and again.
As we've previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these potential buyers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.
Hopefully now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
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Disclaimer: We are not associated with WordPress or any of the WordPress-related products written about on this site. We may derive a financial benefit from sales of products advertised, reviewed or linked to from this site. All information used in this review have been supplied from the plugin's own website and/or from websites that provide premium WordPress service, such as Our Hutch Web Services, or The Website Jedi.