Are you losing business because of a poorly-built web site? Regardless of how great the quality of your services may be, a poorly-built website can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, the way your website looks can be important to the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitors see and this could influence their decision to do business with you.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will switch on our smart device and go browse somebody’s web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your website:

Site Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can impact a user’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the color combinations you want to use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unexciting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How your pages are arranged can have a significant effect on the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues can include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your online presence reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems are caused by factors like your 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 as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, order using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer the most due to a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Common problems that can lead to a bad user experience can include:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should not be kept in obscure areas. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing clients too. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Website – Users want websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages with beautiful images beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another aspect that helps users want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like allowing them to leave comments, 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 users to browse quickly within 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 ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site 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 site is poorly designed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also your existing customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if the work requires a lot of code writing.

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

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you quickly modify the look and feel of your site with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing design settings of your site like color, elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WordPress – Powerful Features

Another great reason to build your site using the WP content management software is that WordPress provides website owners with scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up costing you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like integrated into your site, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you want done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a cart, enter discount coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your WordPress Blog With Plugins

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep them returning to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these consumers will not return and 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 web site 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 click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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