Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-constructed site? A poorly-designed web site can end up losing you potential customers and cause more havoc than you can handle.

In a world where attractive design matters, how your web site looks can affect the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go browse someone’s site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to others? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can impact your prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the color schemes you want to use will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain old ugly visual elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are structured can significantly impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on a website, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems may be caused by external things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all issues get fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these 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 select and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, pay with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where customers suffer most due to a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations on social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Some of the most common issues that can lead to a disappointing user experience can include some or all of the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. 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 content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current customers also. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content is grouped or linked together can provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Customers want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need 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 professionally-taken images beside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let users 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 … You also want visitors to browse quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most neglected 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 site includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

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

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires extensive web development.

If you are considering getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to instantly customize the look of your site without touching the site’s content or modifying any of the core software functionality.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress users available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your site such as the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Features

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up costing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your site such as links not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems 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 WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your site and are freely available, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your customers.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

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

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