Are you missing out on customers because of poor web design? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your potential customers see and this can influence their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you research businesses nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will jump online and go visit somebody’s site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your web site appear to other people? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Problems

Some of the most common design problems that can influence a prospect’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web colors to ensure that the palettes you choose will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can turn prospects off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can significantly impact how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience business opportunity losses.

Web Site Functionality Problems

Typical functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running at all times. In some cases, problems could be caused by external factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discount coupons, buy with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction in social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Here are some of the more common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your web visitors 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 content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current customers. Providing features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Site – Customers want sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages with eye-catching images and well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps customers decide to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage your customers, such as features that let users comment on, 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 around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed 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 comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we strongly suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web content management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you quickly modify the look of your entire website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional WP themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many themes are either freely available, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings on your site such as color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, 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 helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to choose the WordPress website management platform is that WordPress provides users with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited functionality.

Earlier we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can cost you prospective customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality you want to add to your site, just install a plugin that will do what you want done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your website like links not working, audios not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, use discounts, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or can be purchased for a relatively small cost and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and enhanced user experience that will keep users returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, they will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business 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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