Are you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? Regardless of how good your products are, a poorly-built web site can end up costing you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website may be the first thing that a visitors see and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will jump online and go browse a site first before buying goods in-store or online.

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

What prospective customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to ultimately purchase from you.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design issues that can affect your website’s results and performance:

Site Design Issues

Typical web design issues that can impact your visitor’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your site’s results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are tools to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure 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• Design Elements – Pages that contain unattractive, outdated and just plain ugly images can easily turn prospects off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful assistive elements such as search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since websites are now viewed by a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to display your information on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur potential business opportunity losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where some links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, these problems may be related to factors like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that remain proactive and that you attend to all problems immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your website provides users specific features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use coupons, buy using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations on social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your website should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your 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. presentation slides), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also current clients. Providing features like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where your content can be easily found can provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching 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 hyperlinks that point to your product pages by inserting beautiful product pictures with well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Interactive Website – Another area that helps customers want to stick around on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as the ability 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 visitors to be able to navigate quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization is important.
• Reassurance – 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 prospective buyers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of use, security information, affiliate 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 success online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, be aware that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if the work requires editing code extensively.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WP themes are unique website design templates that enable you to instantly change the look of your website without touching the site’s content and changing any underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professional looking WP themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are fully responsive and provide you with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your website like the color, template elements like menus and headers, page layouts and more. This is 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 themes here:

• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Virtually Unlimited Functionality

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides website owners with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your website to provide you with virtually unlimited scalability.

Earlier in this article we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up losing you business.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that you want to integrate into your website, just install a plugin that will do exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any problems with your site like links not working, audios not playing, graphics that are missing or even tell you if your whole web site is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know 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 plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a cart, use discount coupons, complete their purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic plugins that can be downloaded at $0 cost, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins Expand Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep users coming back to your site.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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