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

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can be important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitor sees and this can affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only for doing preliminary research, we still switch to our smart device and go visit somebody’s web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your website appear to visitors? Does it invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some key design issues that can affect your site’s results and performance:

Web Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can impact your prospect’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the colors you use will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain hard to read typefaces can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your content is laid out can affect the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since websites are 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 on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose opportunities.

Functionality Issues

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

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are not acceptable in any website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images are working at all times. In some cases, problems are caused by external factors such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, order using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where visitors suffer the most because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to venting their dissatisfaction in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are some of the more common problems that can create a poor user experience:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your customers 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. 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 potential buyers but also current clients. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Features – Users stick around on websites that are easy to use, easy to navigate, 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, highlight links that direct users to product pages with eye-catching product pictures alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another thing that helps visitors want to stick around on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, like features that let users comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to browse quickly through your website 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 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 clients that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Site 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 isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also current clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site 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 operate, especially if it requires editing code extensively.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your site with the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to immediately modify the look and feel of your entire site without touching the site’s content and modifying the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress users available that you can download and easily install on your site. Many themes are either free of charge, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are responsive and provide users with customizable features for changing the design on your website like the color, template elements like headers and footers, 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 helps your business.

Learn about themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives site owners powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited features.

Earlier in this post we looked at issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can cost you potential customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that will help you get the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any problems with your website such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, graphics that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website 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 goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a cart, use discounts, complete their transactions with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

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

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• WP Plugins – Improving Your Blog’s Functionality

WordPress – An Interactive 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 beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep them coming back again and again.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will not return and 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 web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

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