Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-built website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design is very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

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

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

What web 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 web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the key design problems that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can impact your visitor’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are methods to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the palettes you select will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in the design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to fit your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t showing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues get fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount codes, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that is most affected because of a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction across social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should be easy to locate. Your potential customers 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 information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current customers as well. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with a good experience.
• Compelling Features – Visitors stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct visitors to your product pages with great graphics alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another area that helps users want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to browse 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.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that 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 statement, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute 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 serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code writing.

If you are in the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently provide more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Customizable Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that allow you to immediately modify the look of your entire site in minutes.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free, or are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings of your website such as color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is 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 WordPress themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Plugins – Modular Functionality

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

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

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

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need to integrate with your website, just install a plugin that gets what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, complete their purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful WP plugins that you can download and easily install on your website for free, or are extremely affordable and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you provide your website visitors with a great user experience.

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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