Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed web site could lose you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how most people research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will turn to our mobile device and go browse a web site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does it invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Let’s review some of the key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Design Problems

Typical design issues that can influence your visitor’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the colors you choose will display predictably across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain ugly visual elements can easily turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is arranged can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality problems include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for a website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your online presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, these issues may be caused by things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues addressed 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 intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where potential customers suffer the most because of a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Typical issues that can create a poor user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your visitors 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. PDF reports), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing customers as well. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that lead to your product pages by inserting eye-catching photos or illustrations and well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps visitors decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like 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 users to be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

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

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

First, be aware that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you immediately change the look of your entire website without touching the site’s content and changing the underlying software.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes for WordPress site owners available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either freely available, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design like the color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides website owners with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up losing you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you want integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your website like links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your website 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 products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can download and easily install on your website at no cost, or that are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Expand Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Immediate 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 beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, 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 build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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