Are you losing customers because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-designed website can lose you prospective buyers and important sales.

In a world where looks matter, your website’s design can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a potential client sees and this can influence their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s web site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure 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 affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Site Design Issues

Common design problems that can impact a visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display correctly across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated and just plain hard to read text can turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your page content is arranged can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur potential business losses.

Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality problems can include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable for a website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems are caused by factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your potential clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current clients too. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found will help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken images next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like allowing them to comment on, 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 users to move quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – 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 visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site 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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you have an existing site with design issues that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if it requires editing code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Customizable Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you easily modify the look of your entire site with only a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professional themes available that you can download and install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be bought for a relatively reasonable cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design like the color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides site owners with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited features.

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up costing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that you would like to add to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected on your website like links not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert 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 issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or you can purchase for a relatively reasonable price, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich 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 your customers.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

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, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or website experience.

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

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