Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website can end up losing you prospective new customers and cause more issues than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design sells, how your website looks can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

We do it mostly online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse somebody’s site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to others? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Site Design Issues

Some common design issues that can affect a potential customer’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad 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 colors to ensure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can easily turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems can include the following:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain working at all times. Sometimes, problems could be caused by external things such as your 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 repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors certain functionalities, 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 select and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer the most due to a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are some of the most common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to locate. 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 files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing customers. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where your content is grouped or linked together can provide users with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Customers want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links which direct visitors to product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics alongside well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code writing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or redesigning an existing site, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Web Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you easily modify the look and feel of your site without touching the website’s content and changing the core software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing the design of your site like color, elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides site owners with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited additional functionality.

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

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality you need to integrate with your site, just install a plugin that does what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your website like links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Expanding Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you provide your visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow site visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website or user experience.

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

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