Are you losing business because of a poorly-designed web site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-designed web site can end up losing you potential new clients and cause more turmoil than you can imagine.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your website looks can affect the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still switch on our smart phone and go browse somebody’s web site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some of the key design problems that can affect your site:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common web design problems that can influence a user’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color combinations you choose will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unattractive, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality problems include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable in any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by external factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use discount codes, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations on social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some of the most common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your service information should not be hard to find. 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing customers too. Features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting eye-catching graphics and well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps users want to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like the ability 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 … Additionally, you want users to move quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

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

First, be aware that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if the work requires extensive coding.

If you are in the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently provide more articles about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress website publishing platform on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WP Themes – Customizable Web Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to instantly change the look of your entire site without affecting the website’s content and changing the core site functionality.

There are thousands of professional themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either free, or they can be bought quite cheaply, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing the design on your site like color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited additional functionality.

Earlier in this article we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that gets what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

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 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, apply discount coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Expand Your Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus 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 do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these potential clients will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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