Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site can lose you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a potential buyer sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still turn on our mobile device and go browse someone’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some of the key design issues that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Problems

Some common design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the colors you select will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually boring, outdated or just plain old ugly images can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems can include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable for any website, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems could be related to external things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction on social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Common problems that can create a disappointing user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your customers 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 information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing clients as well. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Customers stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting great graphics alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another aspect that helps visitors want to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, 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 visitors to browse quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate 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 website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also your existing clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind 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 website you own, especially if what needs doing requires modifying code.

If you are researching the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we highly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress site management platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to quickly modify the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as color, elements like menus, headers, 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 helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose the WP content management software is that WordPress provides you with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can cost you prospective clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you want integrated into your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected on your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems 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 system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that you can install on your site free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow customers to contact, 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 rich and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors coming back to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich 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 improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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