Are you losing business because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, the design of your website is becoming more important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go browse a web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

What your prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Design Issues

Common web design problems that can influence a visitor’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the color combinations you use will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can easily turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality problems include the following:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on any website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. Sometimes, these problems may be related to external factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction on social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are some common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your service information should be easy to find. Your 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 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 also current clients. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting beautiful product pictures and well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like features that let users 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 visitors to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings 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 results online. If your website is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires extensive coding.

If you are considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more information about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Website Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to instantly change the look and feel of your site without affecting the website’s content or modifying the core software.

There are thousands of professional looking themes created for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

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

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Functionality

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

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

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up costing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality you need to add to your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discounts, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can install on your site free of charge, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With WP Plugins

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep them coming back to your website.

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

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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