Are you losing business because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built web site can cost you prospective customers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where attractive design sells, the way your website looks can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a prospective client sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s website first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Site Design Problems

Some common web design issues that can influence a prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you want to use will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated or just plain ugly visual elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can have an impact impact in the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other orientation elements like search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose valuable opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality problems can include:

• Too many website errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working all the time. Sometimes, these issues may be related to factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all issues are repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, complete their transactions using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, 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 users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment on social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

Common issues that can lead to a poor user experience include some of following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your potential clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing clients too. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content can be easily found can provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Website – Users want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links that point to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations and well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, like features that let them\visitors comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to browse quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content 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 interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors 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 policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you currently have an existing website with design problems that could be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires a lot of web coding.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Customizable Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that allow you to immediately modify the look of your website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or can be bought quite inexpensively, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing your site’s design like color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

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

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited additional features.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could lose you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you want to add to your site, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems detected on your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you 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 goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discounts, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that can be bought quite cheaply and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improve Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues 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 please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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