Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed site? No matter how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-built web site can end up costing you valuable business.

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

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit a web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Site Design Issues

Typical design issues that can impact a potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the palettes you decide on will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, these issues could be related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their disappointment on social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common issues that can create a poor user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current customers. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with great photos or illustrations beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, such as allowing them to 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 be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived on this site because you currently have an existing website with design issues that you feel could 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 have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web coding.

If you are researching the process of getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we highly recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share 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 seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to instantly customize the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content and changing the underlying software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WP themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either free, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your site’s design such as the color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP website management platform is that WordPress provides users with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this post we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up costing you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

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

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use coupons, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

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

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, they will not return and simply move on to another business with 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 using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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