Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-designed site? A poorly-designed web site could cost you many new customers.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, the way your website looks can contribute significantly to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can influence their decision to purchase.

We mostly do things online. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s web site first before buying something in-store or online.

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

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design issues that can affect your website:

Website Design Issues

Typical design issues that can impact a potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you use will display predictably across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can significantly impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential customers.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use coupons, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Here are just some common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your prospective customers 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing customers. Having features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Website – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with great images and well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, such as the ability 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 … Additionally, you want users to browse quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting 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 such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead 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 clients but also your current customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if it requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we highly recommend that you consider using the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to completely change the look and feel of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be bought for a relatively small cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing design settings on your website like color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WP Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

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

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing 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 issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins designed for WordPress that can be downloaded at no cost, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Expand Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Enhanced Web 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 visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. 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 or website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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