Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? No matter how strong your services are, a poorly-built website can cost you prospective buyers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where attractive design sells, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

People are turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will turn to our smart phone and go visit somebody’s site first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web site appear to them? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

How your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ thoughts and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s review some key design issues that can affect your web site:

Web Site Design Issues

Common web design problems that can affect your prospect’s perception about your website include some following:

• Color – Poor color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to using text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the palettes you decide on will display predictably across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain old ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can significantly impact how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other useful assistive elements such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose customers.

Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems can include the following:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, problems could be caused by things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you attend to all problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your business provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer most due to a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social media, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your site visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. 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.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current customers. Features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Stimulating Web Site – Visitors stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages by inserting great images with well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Website – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like features that let users comment on, 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 … You also want users to move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As you can see, 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 constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you currently have an existing site with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting problems fixed on an existing website can take time and can be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we suggest that you seriously consider choosing the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress CMS platform on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WP Themes – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you instantly modify the look of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of great-looking themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide website owners with highly customizable features for changing your site’s design such as the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners almost unlimited functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier we talked about areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can cost you potential buyers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you would like to add to your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will do what you want done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, pictures that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole web site has gone down? No problems … there are 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, complete their transactions with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great WordPress plugins that can be downloaded for free, or that are extremely affordable, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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