Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website could lose you prospective new customers and cause more turmoil than you can handle.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design can play a significant role in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective buyer sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will probably turn on our smart device and go browse a site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

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

Web Design Problems

Common design problems that can impact a user’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the color schemes you choose will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur potential loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Common functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain working all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply coupons, complete their orders with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where customers suffer the most because of a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing customers too. Having features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Customers want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages by inserting eye-catching photos or illustrations beside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like the ability to leave comments, 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 … You also want users to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also your existing clients too.

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

First, be aware that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we highly suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you completely customize the look of your site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of great-looking themes built for WordPress users available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

WP Plugins – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress provides users with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you need integrated with your site, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your site such as links not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, use coupons, complete their transactions using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can download and install on your site for free, or that are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Expand Your Web Site’s Functionality

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep users returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

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

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