Are you missing out on prospects because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your web site can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this could influence their decision to purchase.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we still switch on our mobile device and go browse somebody’s website first before purchasing something in-store or online.

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

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Website Design Problems

Some of the most common design problems that can affect your user’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are methods that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to ensure that the colors you decide on will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually boring, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive 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 navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some common functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent errors are not acceptable on a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your online presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. In some cases, these problems may be caused by external things 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 get problems corrected as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter coupons, purchase with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that suffers most due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your prospective clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but existing customers also. Having features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Website – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are stimulating. This requires achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks that lead to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken graphics and well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, like features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to browse quickly around your website and access your information 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 sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if it requires a lot of web code modification.

If you are considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing website, then we highly suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently publish more information 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 seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique web design templates that enable you to immediately customize the look of your entire website without affecting the website’s content and changing any of the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing design settings on your site like color, template elements like menus and headers, 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 helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Features

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

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited additional features.

Earlier we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you potential buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a WP plugin that gets the job done.

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

Want a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use discount codes, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally thousands of useful plugins that you can download and easily install on your site and are freely available, or are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Expanding Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

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

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

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