Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-built website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the look of your web site can be important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this can influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse a website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web site appear to them? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your website:

Website Design Issues

Some of the most common design issues that can affect your visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the palettes you decide on will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur potential business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your online presence reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues may be caused by factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete their transactions with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are just some of the more common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your 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. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current customers. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where your content can be easily found can provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting beautiful images with well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps visitors want to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them to 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 … You also want users to move quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure 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 pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective clients but also existing customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires writing web code.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share more information about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you completely change the look of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they can be purchased relatively cheaply, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing design settings on your site like the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WP Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another great reason to build your site using the WP web site publishing software is that WordPress gives you powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can lose you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature you need integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone 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!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins created for WordPress site owners that you can install on your website at $0 cost, or that you can purchase for a relatively inexpensive price, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide web users with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep people coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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