Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-designed web site can cost you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design sells, the way your web site looks is becoming ever more important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still turn to our smart phone and go visit someone’s site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

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

The way your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s review some key design problems that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common design problems that can influence your user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help ensure that the color schemes you use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other assistive elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems may include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, these problems may be related to things like 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 web site offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discounts, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-constructed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction in social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Common problems that can create a bad user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your potential buyers want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but current customers also. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where related content can be easily found will help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers want websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which lead to product pages with eye-popping images alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, like the ability to 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 move quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed 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 confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 website is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also your existing clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if what needs doing requires extensive web coding.

If you are in the process of having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Customizable Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you easily change the look and feel of your website without affecting the website’s content and modifying the underlying site functionality.

There are thousands of professional looking WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be bought quite cheaply, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing design settings of your website like color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress Themes – An Overview

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new features.

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up losing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need to integrate with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great WordPress plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or can be bought for a relatively small cost and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep visitors returning for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, they will simply move on to another business that does offer them 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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