Are you losing customers because of poor web design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-designed website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design is becoming more important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a prospective clients see and this could affect their decision to purchase.

We do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit a web site before taking the next step.

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

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can affect your user’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the palettes you select will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can have an impact impact in the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable customers.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems may be 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 business provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

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

Here are some of the more common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your potential clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing customers as well. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages by inserting great product images with well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is providing 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 visitors to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(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 site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if the work requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Flexible Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you easily change the look and feel of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they can be bought for a relatively inexpensive cost, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are fully responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable options for changing your website’s design settings like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP website management software is that WordPress provides users with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can cost you business.

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

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems detected with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are WP 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 site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your 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 card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins for WordPress users that you can install on your website free of charge, or that are extremely well priced, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Expand Your Website’s Features

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you give customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow site users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep visitors returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these prospective clients will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

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 or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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