Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-constructed web site? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the design of your website can be important to the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this can affect their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go browse a website first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s viewpoint. How does your digital presence appear to others? Does your site invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Site Design Issues

Some of the most common web design issues that can affect a visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the colors you choose will display consistently across different devices. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your page content can impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to display your content across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose valuable customers.

Site Functionality Problems

Some common website functionality issues can include some or all of the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable for a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your web presence reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these issues are related to 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 get problems addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific features or functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter coupons, complete their orders using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their dissatisfaction in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Typical problems that can create a poor user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but existing customers too. Things like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with a good user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Users stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages with beautiful images beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, like allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to navigate quickly within your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassuring Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business 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 policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of current customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of web code modification.

If you are considering having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to quickly change the look and feel of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that you can install on your site. 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 are fully responsive and provide you with customizable features for changing design settings on your site such as color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Modular Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides website owners with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited expansion.

Earlier in this article we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can cost you prospective clients.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you need integrated with your site, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

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

Want a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of great WP plugins that you can download and install on your site for free, or can be bought quite cheaply, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow web users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep your visitors coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these potential clients will 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 web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

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