Are you losing customers because of a poorly-constructed site? A poorly-built web site can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the way your website looks can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective client sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We typically do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse someone’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your web site appear to other people? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

What your customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ thoughts and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design problems that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad 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 you can use to ensure that the palettes you use will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can affect how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some common functionality problems include the following:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues are related to factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get issues corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction on social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common problems that can create a bad user experience can include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your potential buyers 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 content to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing customers. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages with professionally-taken graphics alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is very effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your customers, 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 visitors to browse quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant 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 prospective buyers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing website can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if the work requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or redeveloping an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently provide more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress web site management platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that let you completely customize the look of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, 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 helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Understanding Themes

WordPress – Powerful Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website 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 website could lose you customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that you need to integrate with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole 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 let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your site for free, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Expand Your Website’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and engaging user experience that will keep visitors coming back for more.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, your potential clients will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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