Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-designed website can cost you potential buyers and cause more havoc than you can handle.

In a world where looks matter, how your web site looks can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your prospective customer sees and this can influence their decision to use your services.

People are turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if it’s just for preliminary research, we will instinctively turn to our smart phone and go browse somebody’s site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your web presence appear to online users? Does your site invite them to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at a few key design issues that can affect your web site:

Site Design Problems

Common web design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Clashing color combinations affect your results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the palettes you want to use will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your pages can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As websites are 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 resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur business losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems may include some or all of the following:

• Too many site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable in a website, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues may be related to external things like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that all issues get addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, enter discounts, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-built web site is the “user experience”.

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

Here are some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website should be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your visitors 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. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing customers as well. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content can be easily found will help provide users with a good experience.
• Compelling Site – Users want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that lead to product pages by inserting great graphics beside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another area that helps customers want to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly around your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead 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 customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires extensive web coding.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WP Themes – Instant Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you quickly customize the look of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress site owners available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds 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 site such as color, template elements like menus and headers, 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 works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides users with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could end up costing you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you want to add to your site, just install a WP plugin that does what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems detected on your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, use discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that you can download and easily install on your site for free, or that are extremely well priced and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems 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 types of applications and feature-rich plugins that allow site users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a rich user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these potential buyers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website and website experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you 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 WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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