Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built website can end up losing you valuable business.

In a world where attractive design sells, the look of your website can affect the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a web visitors see and this can affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will probably fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s website first before purchasing products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to others? Does it invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Site Design Issues

Common web design problems that can affect a visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you want to use will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can turn prospects off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are structured can affect how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience potential business losses.

Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to things 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 fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides visitors certain functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, complete purchases with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective clients want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing customers also. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can help provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Features – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching. To accomplish this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that point to your product pages with professionally-taken images with well-written descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, like features that let them\visitors 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 move quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective customers but also your current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on this website because you have an existing site with design problems that may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if it requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently considering having a new website developed or redeveloping an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web content publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Flexible Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that let you easily modify the look and feel of your entire website without affecting the website’s content and modifying any of the underlying software functionality.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or can be bought for a relatively reasonable cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings such as the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited scalability.

Earlier we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality you would like integrated with your site, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you need your site to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected with your website such as links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need 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 inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins that you can install on your website free of charge, or that you can purchase for a relatively small cost and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow site users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, they will not return and 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 get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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