Are you missing out on business because of a poorly-designed site? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-built website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, how your website looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could influence their decision to do business with you.

We do things online. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we will probably jump online and go browse a website before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your web site appear to online users? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Issues

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

• Color – Unattractive color combinations 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 color palettes to help ensure that the color combinations you use will display predictably across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain hard to read fonts can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is laid out can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur potential loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Typical functionality issues may include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website reflects your business. It’s important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems are caused by factors like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discount codes, complete their orders using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-constructed site is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some of the more common issues that can create a bad user experience can include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should not be hard to find. Your prospective customers 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but also current customers. Things such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Website – Customers want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight links pointing to product pages by inserting eye-catching images next to well-written product descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your visitors, like allowing them to comment on, 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 … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliant Site – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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

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 complete website overhaul can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently operate, especially if the work requires changing a lot of web code.

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

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Instant Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you instantly modify the look of your entire website without affecting the site’s content and changing the underlying software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professional themes created for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free of charge, or can be purchased quite cheaply, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design like color, template elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

WordPress – Modular Functionality

Another compelling reason to choose the WP web content publishing software is that WordPress gives you powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could lose you customers.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a WP plugin that does what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your website such as links not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, pay with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins that can be downloaded and are freely available, or that are relatively inexpensive, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Expand Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and plugins that allow web visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep them coming back to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich 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 website and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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