Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built website? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, the design of your website is very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a prospective customer sees and this could influence 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 browse a site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your website appear to them? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

What your potential customers 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 influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Site Design Issues

Some of the most common design problems that can affect a prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unexciting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur significant business losses.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these problems are caused by things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discount coupons, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your product information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current customers. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Customers want websites 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 web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting great product images beside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps customers want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, financial 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 isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also your current customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress site publishing platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you completely modify the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be bought relatively inexpensively, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings of your site like the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

Plugins – Modular Expansion

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up costing you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like integrated into your site, just install a plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, complete their purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

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

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Expand Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

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

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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