Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-designed website? A poorly-built web site could cost you potential new customers and cause more turmoil than you could ever wish for.

In a world where looks matter, the design of your website is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may switch on our smart device and go visit someone’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to online users? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to move forward with you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some of the key design problems that can affect your website:

Website Design Problems

Typical design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception about your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the colors you use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is structured can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential opportunities.

Site Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable on any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, 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 website provides users certain functionality, 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 functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, buy using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your potential buyers 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. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing customers as well. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found will help provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which point to your product pages by inserting eye-catching images alongside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, 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 faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable 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 compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also current clients too.

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

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

If you are in the process of getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you easily customize the look and feel of your site without touching the site’s content and changing any of the underlying site functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or are relatively cheap, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing the design of your website like color, elements like menus, headers, footers, page 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 ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited features.

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 business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you would like to integrate into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected on your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins that can be easily downloaded at no cost, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Extend Your Blog’s Capability

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep your visitors returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and better website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues 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 for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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