Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-constructed site? A poorly-built website can lose you valuable business.

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

Think about how most people research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s just doing preliminary research, we will probably jump online and go visit a site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s position. How does your web presence appear to online users? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused 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’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can affect your visitor’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the color combinations you choose will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is laid out can have a significant impact in how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose valuable business opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Some common functionality problems may include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable for any website, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, these problems may be caused by factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that all problems are corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities 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 shopping cart, enter coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current clients too. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content can be easily found can help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Visitors want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with great graphics beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as the ability to comment on, 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 … You also want users to browse quickly through your website 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 ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site 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 on this site because you currently have an existing website with design problems that are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires editing code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to easily change the look and feel of your website without affecting the site’s content or changing any underlying software.

There are thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing the design on your site such as color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Features

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

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

Earlier in this article we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can lose you prospective customers.

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

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website such as links not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, complete purchases using 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 easily downloaded at no cost, or that are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website or better website experience.

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

***

***