Are you losing business because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-designed web site could end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your website looks can be important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your web visitors see and this could influence their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we still turn on our mobile device and go visit a website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your website appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design issues that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical design problems that can affect a visitor’s perception about your site include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the colors you select will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can turn prospective clients away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is arranged can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur potential business opportunity losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues may include:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t showing. Frequent errors are not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. In some cases, these issues are related to factors like 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 all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use coupons, complete their orders with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Common issues that can cause a bad user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your prospective customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current clients as well. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Features – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links that direct users to your product pages by inserting eye-catching graphics with well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps users decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability 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 move quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your website is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also current clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are researching the process of getting a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that allow you to completely customize the look of your website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WP themes available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be bought for a relatively reasonable price, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing the design on your site such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, 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 ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides site owners with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can end up costing you prospective buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your website, just install a WP plugin that will do exactly what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images 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 let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping 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 thousands of fantastic plugins created for WordPress that you can download and install on your website and are freely available, or are relatively cheap to purchase and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Improve Your Blog’s Features And 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 provide your customers with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow website visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive 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 with a better website.

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

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