Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-built web site could end up losing you potential new customers and a lot of money.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could influence their decision to do business with you.

We typically mostly do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to online users? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Some of the most common design issues that can affect a visitor’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the color combinations you decide on will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain old ugly visual elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential customers.

Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems may include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable for a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, these problems are caused by things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction in social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some common problems that can cause a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your customers 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), 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 potential buyers but existing clients also. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content can be easily found can provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with professionally-taken product images with well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps users decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as allowing them 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 users to move quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and 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 paying clients but also existing clients as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete 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 the work requires extensive web code editing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you instantly change the look of your website without affecting the website’s content and changing any of the core software.

There are thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they can be bought relatively inexpensively, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your website’s design such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

Plugins – Modular Scalability

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected on your site such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire website is 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 transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, apply discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that you can install on your website at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap to purchase, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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