Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-constructed site? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-constructed web site could lose you valuable business.

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

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse a site first before buying products in-store or online.

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

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

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Site Design Issues

Typical design problems that can impact a potential customer’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Bad color schemes affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools to help make sure that the color combinations you want to use will display consistently across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can affect how visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose valuable opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality issues include the following:

• Frequent website errors – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are working all the time. Sometimes, these 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 remain proactive and that you get problems fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment in social sites, user forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your potential clients 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. PDF forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also existing customers. Providing features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and well-organized areas where your content is grouped or linked together can provide users with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To achieve this you need to find a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that lead to your product pages with 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 also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps customers decide to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as allowing them to 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 visitors to navigate quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business results online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential clients but also existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you currently have an existing site with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you own, especially if the work requires a lot of web coding.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to completely change the look of your site with just a few mouse clicks.

There are thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress site owners available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free, or they can be purchased for a relatively reasonable cost, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

WordPress – Powerful Expansion

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

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited additional features.

Earlier in this post we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can end up costing you money.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a feature that you want integrated into your site, just install a plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your website such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire website 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!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, order using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can install on your website free of charge, or are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Website’s Capability

WordPress – A Rich User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and functional plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep users returning for more.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, consumers 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 problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.

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