Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-designed web site can cost you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, how your website looks can affect the success of your business. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective buyer sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We do things online. Even if it’s only for preliminary research, we will probably jump online and go visit someone’s site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your website appear to online users? Does it invite them to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

The way your site looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately move forward with you.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design issues that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Site Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can impact your prospect’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Bad color combinations can affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the colors you select will display correctly across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain old ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by subtle inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can have an impact impact in how users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is 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 display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential business opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics aren’t showing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your business. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. Sometimes, these issues are related to factors like your web 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 site provides visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, complete purchases using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to venting their frustrations across social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Common issues that can create a poor user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your web 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 content to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing clients. Things like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks which point to product pages with professionally-taken graphics with well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as features that let users comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to navigate quickly within your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 website is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also current clients too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take time and can also end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires extensive web development.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish more articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Web Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you immediately customize the look of your entire site without affecting the site’s content and modifying any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional WordPress themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable features for changing the design on your website like color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately helps to improve your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• Understanding WP Themes

Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to choose the WP CMS is that WordPress gives users modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can lose you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you would like integrated with your website, just install a plugin that gets things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected on your website like links not working, videos not playing, images that are missing or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add products to a cart, apply coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of useful WordPress plugins that you can download and install on your site and are freely available, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Extend Your Website’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people coming back for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress web content publishing software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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