Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? No matter how good your products are, a poorly-constructed website can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design matters, your website’s design is becoming ever more important to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

People are turning to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may switch on our mobile device and go browse someone’s site first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

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

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your site:

Site Design Issues

Typical design problems that can affect your user’s perception about your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can affect your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you use will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unappealing, outdated or just plain old ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you lay out your content can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur loss of customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Common functionality problems include:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable for any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working all the time. Sometimes, problems could be related to factors like your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users specific features, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, use coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative publicity.

Some common issues that can cause a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Your service information should not be kept in obscure places. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. presentation slides), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but existing clients also. Providing features like descriptive links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides users with an enjoyable experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Users stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which point to product pages by inserting beautiful photos or illustrations and well-written product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps visitors decide to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage visitors, like features that let them\visitors 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 … You also want visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed 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 interacting with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 built, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also your current clients too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this article because you currently have an existing website with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if what needs doing requires editing code extensively.

If you are researching the process of having a new website built or overhauling an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to instantly modify the look and feel of your entire website without touching the site’s content and changing any core software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing the design of your site such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and site typography, layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using the WP web content publishing platform is that WordPress provides website owners with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we talked about issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily. If there is a functionality that you need to add to your website, just install a plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any problems on your website such as links not working, audios not streaming, graphics that are missing or even alert you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply discount codes, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can install on your site for free, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins Expand Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress – A Rich Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you provide web users with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

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

Hopefully, now you have 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 WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

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