Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-designed site? A poorly-designed web site could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can be very important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a prospective client sees and this can affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will probably fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your website appear to them? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

What your prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Site Design Problems

Some of the most common web design problems that can affect your visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the palettes you use will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly visual elements can turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can significantly impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience potential business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, these issues are related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues are repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

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

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

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your visitors 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content can be easily found will provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to product pages by inserting professionally-taken product images with well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, such as allowing them to leave comments, 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 be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed 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 prospective buyers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also your current customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting problems addressed on an existing website can take some time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires a lot of code writing.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or redeveloping an existing web site, then we highly suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to immediately change the look of your website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively cheap to buy, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing the design on your website such as color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are 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.

Learn about themes here:

• WP Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited features.

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you need integrated with your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want your website to do.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures 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!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete their purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of great WP plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Enhance Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Engaging Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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