Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-built web site can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where looks matter, the design of your web site can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this could influence their decision to use your services.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may jump online and go visit somebody’s site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your web site appear to others? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

What your web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some of the key design problems that can affect your website’s results:

Web Design Issues

Common web design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the palettes you decide on will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can have a significant impact on how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable business opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these problems could be related to factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

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

Some of the most common problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your service information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your 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. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing clients too. Having features like descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that direct users to product pages with professionally-taken product pictures with well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps customers decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as features that let users 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 visitors to move quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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 built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site with design problems that may be affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues 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 own, especially if the work requires extensive web development.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide 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 consider using WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to instantly modify the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the website’s content and modifying the core software.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are fully responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing the design on your site like the color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes

WP Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could lose you money.

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

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of great plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or that are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep people returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, your prospective clients will not return and 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 expand your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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