Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-built website could end up costing you potential new customers and cause more issues than you can handle.

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can be important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your visitors see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people research products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse somebody’s site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your website appear to other people? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design problems that can affect your website:

Web Design Issues

Some common web design problems that can influence a visitor’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help ensure that the palettes you decide on will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can have an impact effect on the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful orientation elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose customers.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for any website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these issues may be related to external factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems get fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use coupons, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where customers suffer most due to a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction across social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Typical issues that can cause a bad user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should not be kept in obscure areas. 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 information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current clients also. Features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where your content can be easily found will provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links that direct users to product pages by inserting eye-popping graphics and well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly through your site 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 most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

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

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires a lot of web coding.

If you are in the process of getting a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Customizable Web Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you immediately customize the look of your website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many of these are either free, or they are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with customizable options for changing design settings on your site such as color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

WordPress – Modular Features

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

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can lose you potential customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need integrated with your website, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your site such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WP 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 site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business 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 select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, complete their transactions with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of great WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your website free of charge, or that are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Extend Your Site’s Features

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users returning to your website.

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

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 WP platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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