Are you losing business because of poor web design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-built web site can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where visually attractive things matter, the way your website looks can play a significant part in the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this can affect their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse someone’s web site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your web presence appear to other people? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

What your customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the key design issues that can affect your website:

Site Design Issues

Common web design problems that can impact a prospect’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations 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 make sure that the colors you want to use will display predictably across various web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can easily turn prospects off your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your site is arranged can affect the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose customers.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these issues could be caused by factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, complete their orders with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their disappointment in social networks, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are some of the more common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but current clients as well. Having features like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found will provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Website – Visitors stick around on sites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. This means striving for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links which point to product pages by inserting eye-popping images next to well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage your customers, 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 … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your potential 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 statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

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 isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, 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 here because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we highly recommend that you consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that enable you to quickly change the look of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of great-looking themes designed for WordPress users available that you can download and install on your website. Many themes are either free, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing design settings on your website like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, 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 helps to improve your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress web content management software is that WordPress provides site owners with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited features.

Earlier we looked at issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could cost you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be integrated with your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will transform your website 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 online and provide your users with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that you can download and easily install on your site free of charge, or that you can purchase quite inexpensively, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep them coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, they will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WP CMS software please see other posts we have published on this site.

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