Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed site? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-designed web site can end up losing you potential customers and cause more havoc than you can imagine.

In a world where attractive design matters, the way your website looks can be important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective clients see and this can affect their decision to buy your products or use your services.

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s web site before making our next move.

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

What your prospects see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Website Design Issues

Some common design issues that can affect a potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you choose will display predictably across different devices. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unexciting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can turn users away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur business losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality problems may include some following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable for a website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable company. Your digital presence reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. In some cases, problems are related to things such as your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get problems repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers users specific functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discount codes, complete their purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations across social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are just some of the most common issues that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your visitors 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. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current clients. Features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together will provide users with a good user experience.
• Stimulating Website – Visitors stick around on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages by inserting great product images with well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage users, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of current clients as well.

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

First, be aware that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if it requires a lot of web development.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or upgrading an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your site with WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Inexpensive Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that allow you to instantly modify the look and feel of your entire site in minutes.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable options for changing the design of your website like the color, template elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

WP Plugins – Powerful Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress web site management platform is that WordPress gives you expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can lose you potential buyers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that does exactly what you want done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, pictures that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are tens of thousands of useful plugins built for WordPress site owners that you can install on your site at no cost, or that are relatively cheap to purchase, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers 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 improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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