Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? No matter how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-constructed website could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive things matter, how your web site looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit somebody’s site first before buying something in-store or online.

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

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to engage with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Here are just some of the main design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Website Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your 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 palettes to help make sure that the color combinations you use will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated and just plain hard to read text can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Some common functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent errors are not acceptable in any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. Sometimes, these problems are related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities 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 items to a cart, use discount coupons, complete their transactions with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their disappointment on social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Some of the more common problems that can lead to a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your site 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. spreadsheets), 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 potential clients but existing customers too. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Users want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which point to product pages with eye-popping graphics beside well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization 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 web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute 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 clients but also your current clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived on our site because you currently have an existing website with design issues that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if the work requires extensive web development.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that allow you to easily modify the look of your entire site without affecting the site’s content and changing any underlying site functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide website owners with customizable options for changing the design on your site like color, template elements like headers and footers, 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.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

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

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

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you 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 goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or that are relatively cheap to purchase and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Expand Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow site users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

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

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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