Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-designed website? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-built web site can lose you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the way your website looks can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit somebody’s web site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to them? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can impact your user’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the palettes you decide on will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated and just plain hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As business information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant loss of customers.

Site Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems may be caused by external things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get issues corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing clients. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with beautiful images alongside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps visitors want to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as 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 … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also current clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived on this website because you have an existing website with design problems that could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires modifying web code.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Instant Web Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you quickly customize the look and feel of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WP themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be bought for a relatively reasonable cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide website owners with customizable features for changing the design on your website like color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Modular Expansion

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

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this article we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can cost you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature you would like to add to your site, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you want your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site like links not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins created for WordPress users that you can install on your site free of charge, or that you can buy for a reasonable price, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you provide site visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow web users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep visitors coming back to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better website experience.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

***

***