Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-built website? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-designed website could end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a potential buyers see and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about services nowadays. Even if it’s just preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s site first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s point of view. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and cautious about what to do next?

What 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 influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Site Design Issues

Some of the most common web design problems that can influence your potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help ensure that the palettes you want to use will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain boring, outdated and just plain old hard to read text can turn prospective clients away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your content can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience loss of customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent site errors are not acceptable for any website, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems may be caused by things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all issues are fixed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors specific features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discounts, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-designed 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 vent their disappointment in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current customers also. Things such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can help provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Customers stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that point to your product pages by inserting beautiful images and well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps users want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, like features that let users 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to navigate quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also current customers too.

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

First, understand that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are researching the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing site, then we strongly suggest that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently provide a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress content management platform on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Flexible Web Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you easily customize the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide site owners with highly customizable features for changing the design on your site 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 create a design for your website that helps to improve your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site could end up costing you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a WP plugin that gets things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even alert you if your entire website has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

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

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded and are freely available, or are relatively cheap and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Enhance Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – An Enhanced Website User Experience

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

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

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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