Are you losing business because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-designed web site can cost you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your web site looks is very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a potential buyer sees and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s web site before making our next move.

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

What web visitors 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 factors than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to move forward and do business with you.

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

Let’s review some key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Site Design Issues

Common design problems that can affect your user’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you use will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old ugly visual elements can turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience significant loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems may be caused by things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these features 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, apply discount coupons, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Here are just some of the more common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your visitors 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current clients too. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found can help provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Website – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which lead to product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations and well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as allowing them to 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 users to move quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – 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 web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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 customers but also current clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting issues addressed on an existing site can take time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if the work requires editing web code extensively.

If you are in the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress content management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth 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 use WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to easily customize the look of your website without touching the website’s content or modifying the underlying site functionality.

There are thousands of professional WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings of your website like the color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress web site publishing software is that WordPress gives users expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site 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 constructed web site could cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that gets the job done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems on your website such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are 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 WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

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

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins Expand Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you give your visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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