Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-built web site could lose you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your website looks can be important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse a website before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your web site appear to others? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Design Problems

Typical design issues that can impact a user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the color combinations you select will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can have an impact impact on 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 browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your web presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working at all times. Sometimes, these problems could be caused by things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want 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 products to a cart, enter coupons, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment on social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current customers. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct visitors to your product pages by inserting great graphics next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also your current clients too.

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

First, understand that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if it requires modifying web code extensively.

If you are considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you quickly modify the look and feel of your website without touching the site’s content or changing the core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes designed for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be purchased for a relatively reasonable cost, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design such as color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Functionality

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited features or functionality.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can lose you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a plugin that will get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your site such as links not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole 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!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that can be downloaded free of charge, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Web Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for customers.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these prospective buyers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues 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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