Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? Regardless of how strong your services are, a poorly-designed web site can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where looks matter, the design of your website can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitors see and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Site Design Issues

Typical design issues that can affect a visitor’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the color schemes you use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your website reflects your company. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these problems are related to things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations on social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are just some of the more common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your web 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 users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing customers also. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with eye-popping product pictures beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps customers want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, 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 … You also want visitors to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing site with design issues that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if the work requires editing web code extensively.

If you are considering getting a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking themes designed for WordPress users available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your site like the color, elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a WP plugin that does what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

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 inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discount coupons, complete their orders using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins designed for WordPress site owners that can be downloaded and are freely available, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Improving Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your web users.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them returning again and again.

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

Hopefully, this post 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 using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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