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

In a world where looks matter, the look of your website can be important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a potential buyers see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

We do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go visit someone’s web site first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s perspective. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about where to go next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Web Design Issues

Some of the most common design issues that can impact your user’s perception about your website include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web colors you can use to make sure that the palettes you choose will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can easily turn prospects away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is structured can have a significant effect on the way users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As digital information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common functionality issues include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable in a website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your organization. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. Sometimes, these issues could be caused by external factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides users certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply coupons, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction on social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical issues that can create a bad user experience include the following:

• User-Friendly – Your site should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for 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 files.
• Organization – If your website isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also existing clients. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and well-organized sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting professionally-taken product pictures beside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like the ability to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly through your site 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 ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, earnings 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 results online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also existing clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you have an existing website with design issues that are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or upgrading an existing web site, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to publish a lot more posts about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Site Design Features

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you completely modify the look and feel of your entire site without touching the site’s content or modifying any of the core software.

There are thousands of professional themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many of these are either free, or are relatively cheap, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing design settings of your website such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

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

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

Earlier in this article we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can cost you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a feature you want to integrate into your site, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you want done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your website like links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your whole web 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 let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several 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, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of great plugins that you can download and install on your site at no cost, or that are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improve Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow website users to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep them coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP CMS software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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