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

In a world where attractive design matters, the way your website looks can be important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we may turn to our smart device and go visit someone’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the main design problems that can affect your website:

Website Design Problems

Typical design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the colors you use will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose customers.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality issues can include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Frequent errors are not acceptable in a website, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your web presence reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working at all times. Sometimes, these issues 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 as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site 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 customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

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

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

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current clients. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content can be easily found will help provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with great graphics and well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps customers decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to browse quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also some of existing customers too.

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

First, understand that getting issues addressed 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 currently own, especially if the work requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Customizable Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you completely change the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another great reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress provides you with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited features and functionality.

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you would like to add to your site, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you want your website to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics 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 notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply discount codes, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can install on your site and are freely available, or can be bought quite inexpensively and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your WP Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep visitors returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

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

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