Are you losing business because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website could lose you prospective new customers and cause more problems than you can imagine.

In a world where first impressions matter, how your web site looks can play a significant role in the success of your business. Your website is probably the first thing that your potential buyer sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We typically do it mostly online. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s website before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your website appear to other people? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the key design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Website Design Problems

Common web design problems that can impact a potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the palettes you use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read fonts can turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can affect the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose potential opportunities.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include:

• Frequent site 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 displaying. Persistent errors are not acceptable on a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to things like your web 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 all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that suffers the most because of a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment on social networks, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Typical problems that can cause a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your prospective customers 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 files to your site (e.g. PDF files), make sure that users 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 potential buyers but also current customers. Providing features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
• Compelling Site – Users stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This requires aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links which direct visitors to your product pages with beautiful product pictures beside well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, like the ability 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 users to browse quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable 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 compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site 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 designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also some of existing clients too.

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

First, understand that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if it requires writing code.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that let you easily modify the look of your site without touching the website’s content and modifying any of the underlying software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design like color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Features

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WP web site management platform is that WordPress provides users with scalable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier in this post we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a plugin that gets the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your website like links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress 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 transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce 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 features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that you can download and install on your site at no cost, or that are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow web users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep them coming back to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will simply move on to another business with a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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