Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed site? A poorly-constructed web site could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your website looks can play a significant part in your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

We mostly do it online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may switch to our mobile device and go visit somebody’s web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to other people? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What your customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Here are just some of the main design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Web Site Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can affect your user’s perception of your website include some following:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the color combinations you select will display correctly across different web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can impact the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other assistive elements such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• 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 fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience loss of customers.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working all the time. In some cases, these problems could be caused by external factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that all problems are fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment on social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Common issues that can lead to a disappointing user experience include some or all of the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your visitors 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. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current customers as well. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers stick around on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with professionally-taken images alongside well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another aspect that helps visitors decide to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as allowing them to leave comments, 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 through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

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

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you currently have an existing site with design problems that may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires writing code.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that let you quickly customize the look of your entire site without touching the site’s content or changing any core site functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing the design on your site such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Modular Features

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new features and functionality.

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality you need integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter discount codes, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that you can install on your website and are freely available, or that are extremely well priced, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. 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.

Hopefully, this information has given you 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 the WP CMS platform please see our related posts section.

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