Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website could end up losing you potential new customers and cause more issues than you can imagine.

In a world where attractive design sells, how your website looks can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this can influence their decision to purchase from you.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website 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 your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

What your prospective buyers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can influence a prospect’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the colors you decide on will display correctly across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated and just plain old ugly graphic elements can turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How your site is laid out can affect the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant loss of customers.

Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems could be related to factors such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that all problems get corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain functionalities, 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 customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply discounts, pay using credit cards 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 web site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment on social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical issues that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with minimal hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers as well. Having features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors stick around on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that lead to your product pages by inserting eye-catching photos or illustrations alongside well-written descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, like 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective clients but also your existing clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if what needs doing requires editing code extensively.

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

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you completely change the look and feel of your site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes for WordPress are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design such as the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To WP Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to build your site using the WP CMS is that WordPress gives users expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could end up costing you potential clients.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like integrated with your site, just install a plugin that will help you get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need 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 WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of great plugins that can be downloaded free of charge, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Improve Your Website’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep them coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will simply move on to another business 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 using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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