Are you losing business because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built website can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design matters, the way your website looks can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a prospective buyer sees and this can affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how you research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your website appear to online users? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can impact a potential customer’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can impact on 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 help make sure that the colors you select will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is structured can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful assistive features like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Some common functionality problems may include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, these problems may be related to factors like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues are corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your potential clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing clients also. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found will help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages by inserting beautiful graphics alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let them\visitors comment on, 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 users to move quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident 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 such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of current customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if it requires a lot of web coding.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to immediately customize the look and feel of your site without touching the site’s content or modifying any core software.

There are thousands of professional themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing the design on your website such as color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides site owners with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you want to add to your site, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want your site to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins built for WordPress site owners that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or can be purchased for a relatively reasonable price, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Extending Your Web Site’s Functionality

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow site users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep visitors coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these prospective clients will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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