Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website could end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the design of your web site can be very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitor sees and this could affect their decision to use your services.

We typically do it mostly online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we may fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s web site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your digital presence appear to them? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Web Site?

Here are just some of the main design issues that can affect your website:

Web Design Problems

Common design problems that can impact a potential customer’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the color combinations you choose will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unexciting, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can easily turn users away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your page content can have a significant impact in the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your content on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur potential loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site 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 professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems may be caused by factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get problems repaired immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter coupons, complete their transactions with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their frustrations in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your potential 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 content to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing clients. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages with great product pictures with well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps visitors want to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to browse quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliant Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if what needs doing requires editing code.

If you are currently considering getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to completely modify the look of your site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WordPress themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing design settings of your website such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• Themes – An Introduction

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress website publishing platform is that WordPress provides you with almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

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

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you want to add to your website, just install a WP plugin that will help you get the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems on your site like links not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire website 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 let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use discount codes, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins created for WordPress site owners that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or that are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Features

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-designed web site, WordPress can also help you provide website users with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep users returning to your website.

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

Hopefully, this information 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 using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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