Are you losing customers because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-constructed website could cost you valuable business.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, the design of your website can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will turn to our mobile device and go browse somebody’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

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

What web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your web site:

Site Design Issues

Some common design issues that can influence your potential customer’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the palettes you want to use will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain ugly images can turn prospects off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed by various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential business opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems are related to factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-constructed website is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your prospective customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but also existing clients. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To achieve this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links which lead to product pages by inserting professionally-taken photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you currently have an existing site with design problems that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if the work requires a lot of web development.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share more in-depth posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you easily change the look and feel of your entire website without touching the website’s content and changing the underlying software.

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

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers 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 works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives website owners almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited new features or new functionality.

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could end up losing you potential buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems on your site such as hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your entire site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need 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 inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins created for WordPress that you can download and install on your site and are freely available, or are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Web Site’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you give your customers a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these prospective customers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and better website experience.

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

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