Are you losing customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site can cost you potential customers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the way your web site looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a potential customers see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s website before deciding what to do next.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your website appear to other people? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them 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 affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to proceed with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s review some key design issues that can affect your site:

Website Design Problems

Typical design problems that can affect a user’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the colors you choose will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old ugly images can turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can significantly impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other guiding features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems can include the following:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount codes, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Typical issues that can cause a disappointing user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure places. Your visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current clients too. Providing features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Site – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links that direct customers to product pages by inserting great graphics alongside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps visitors want to stick around on your website 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 support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your potential clients that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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

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

First, be aware that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Web Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that allow you to immediately modify the look of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress site owners available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing the design on your website such as the color, 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 helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides users with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can lose you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need integrated with your site, just install a WP plugin that will help you get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins designed for WordPress that can be easily downloaded for free, or that can be bought for a relatively reasonable price and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web 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 customers.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep people returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website and better website 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 the WordPress web site management software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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