Are you losing customers because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website could end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design matters, the look of your web site can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your potential customer sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we will typically fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your website appear to others? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your site:

Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can impact a prospect’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to ensure that the palettes you use will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily turn visitors off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your page content can significantly impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since business information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Some common functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your online presence reflects your organization. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, these issues may be related to factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems are addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use discount codes, purchase with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, the area that suffers most due to a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their dissatisfaction on social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common problems that can lead to a bad user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current clients. Having features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean areas where topic-related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors want sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links that lead to your product pages with eye-popping photos or illustrations alongside 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 want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let users comment on, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to be able to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are 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 usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute 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 paying clients but also existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you have an existing website with design problems that are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if it requires extensive web development.

If you are considering getting a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we strongly recommend that you consider using the WordPress web site management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that let you immediately change the look of your entire website without affecting the website’s content and modifying any of the underlying software.

There are thousands of professional WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable options for changing the design of your site such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WordPress CMS is that WordPress gives site owners modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WP themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this article we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can cost you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your website, just install a WordPress plugin that will do exactly what you need your site to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your site like links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use 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 choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, complete their orders with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can install on your site free of charge, or are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Interactive Website 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, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep people coming back again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, these potential buyers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

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

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