Are you losing business because of a poorly-built site? No matter how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-designed website can lose you many new customers.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

We typically mostly do it online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still turn on our mobile phone and go browse a site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your digital presence appear to other people? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious 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 visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Web Site?

Here are just some of the more important design issues that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical design issues that can influence your potential customer’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain ugly graphics can easily turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can have a significant effect on the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, 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 viewed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience significant business losses.

Website Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. In some cases, problems could be related to external factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

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

Common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing clients. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clean sections where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with professionally-taken product pictures alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps customers decide to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as the ability to comment on, 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 move quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website 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 site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of existing customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on this site because you currently have an existing site with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires extensive code editing.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we strongly suggest that you consider using the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

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

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited extra functionality.

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could end up costing you prospective clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your website, just install a plugin that will get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected with your website like links not working, videos not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want 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 inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress 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 easily choose and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress site owners that can be downloaded and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap to buy and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Expand Your Website’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you give your web users a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow site users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep people coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, your prospective buyers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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