Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-constructed web site? Regardless of how great the quality of your products and services may be, a poorly-designed website could lose you valuable business.

In a world where first impressions matter, your website’s design is very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that a prospective client sees and this can influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go browse someone’s website before taking the next step.

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

How your website looks is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to ultimately do business with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Here are just some of the key design problems that can affect your site:

Web Site Design Issues

Common web design issues that can affect a potential customer’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the palettes you decide on will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unappealing, outdated or just plain ugly visual elements can easily turn prospects off your website.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 visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your web design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose potential opportunities.

Site Functionality Problems

Typical website functionality issues include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent errors are no longer acceptable, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your online presence is a reflection of your business. It’s vitally important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images are running smoothly at all times. In some cases, problems may be related to things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you get issues addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, use coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, the area that is most affected due to a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

Common issues that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

• Ease Of Use – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Your product information should not be kept in obscure corners. 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 files 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 content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing clients. Providing features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with stimulating options. This means achieving a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with great photos or illustrations with well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, like allowing them to leave comments, 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 within your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization 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 visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing site with design issues that could be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting a website overhaul can take time and can also be fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website built or redesigning an existing web site, then we recommend that you consider choosing the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish more in-depth posts about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Web Site Design Features

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that let you instantly customize the look of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress users available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free, or are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design such as the color, elements like menus and headers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

WordPress – Modular Functionality

Another compelling reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides site owners with expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited extra features.

Earlier we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed web site can end up costing you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you want integrated into 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 detected on your website like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire web 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!

Need a plugin that will transform your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? 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 features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that you can install on your site at $0 cost, or are extremely affordable, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Expand Your Blog’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP 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 research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, your prospective customers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems 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 please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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