Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed web site can lose you many new customers.

In a world where appearances matter, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitors see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

We do it online. Even if it’s just for doing preliminary research, we still turn on our smart device and go browse somebody’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to online users? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately engage with you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your site:

Website Design Issues

Some common design issues that can affect your potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the colors you choose will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can easily turn prospective clients away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are laid out can impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose potential customers.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality issues include:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that suffers most due to a poorly-designed site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

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

Here are just some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your service information should not be hard to find. Your potential customers 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 files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing customers too. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where your content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to your product pages by inserting great product images beside well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, such as the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move 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 comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires editing web code extensively.

If you are considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Customizable Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to completely change the look and feel of your entire website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

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

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives you powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited additional functionality.

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

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you would like to add to your site, just install a plugin that will get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn 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 functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete their transactions using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your site at no cost, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, 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 a highly interactive user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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