Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the look of your web site is becoming more important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a prospective client sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

We mostly do things online. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will switch to our mobile device and go browse someone’s site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

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

What prospects 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 affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your web site:

Site Design Problems

Some common design issues that can affect a prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the palettes you choose will display consistently across various devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unexciting, outdated or just plain hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your pages can impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now accessed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally 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 business opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these issues are caused by factors such as your 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 problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain features or functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, complete their transactions using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are some common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your web visitors 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 files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing clients. Having features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content can be easily found can help provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links that direct users to product pages by inserting beautiful images next to well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability 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 around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Website – 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 potential customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC 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 isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also your current customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if the work requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are considering having a new website built or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to easily customize the look and feel of your entire site without touching the website’s content and changing any core software functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or they can be bought for a relatively reasonable price, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are fully responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing design settings of your website such as color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP Themes – An Introduction

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could end up costing you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you need integrated with your website, just install a plugin that does what you want done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your website such as links not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

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

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that you can install on your website and are freely available, or are relatively cheap and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WP Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and plugins that allow website visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users returning again and again.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.

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