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

In a world where attractive design matters, the look of your website can be very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this can influence their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will turn to our smart phone and go visit somebody’s website first before buying products in-store or online.

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

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately move forward with you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some of the main design issues that can affect your site:

Website Design Issues

Common design problems that can influence your potential customer’s perception of your site include some following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to make sure that the palettes you use will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through a range of 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 on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable on a website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your web presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems are related to factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities 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 choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Common issues that can cause a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing clients. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks which direct customers to your product pages with great product pictures alongside well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as features that let users leave comments, 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 visitors to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also your existing clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to easily modify the look and feel of your website without affecting the site’s content or changing any of the underlying software.

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

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable features for changing the design of your site such as color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Modular Expansion

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this post we discussed issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like to add to your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will help you get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins that you can install on your website and are freely available, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Extend Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Enhanced Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you provide customers with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and 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, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep users returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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