Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-constructed site? A poorly-constructed website can lose you potential customers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the way your web site looks can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this can affect their purchasing decision.

We typically do it online. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will instinctively jump online and go visit somebody’s website first before purchasing goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your website appear to online users? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

What your visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately move forward and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just a few key design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Site Design Issues

Typical design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception of your website include some or all of the following:

• Color – Clashing color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the color combinations you decide on will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain unappealing, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can easily turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your content can impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will experience significant loss of customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Common functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable for a website, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics are running smoothly at all times. Sometimes, problems are related to external things like your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter discount codes, order with a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to vent their frustrations on social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative attention.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your website must be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure areas. Your site 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. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organization – If your site content isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing clients too. Having features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where related content is grouped or linked together provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Visitors stay longer on sites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. This requires finding 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 professionally-taken product images alongside well-crafted product 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 Site – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage users, like 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 … Additionally, you want visitors to move quickly within your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

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

Now … what if you have arrived found this information because you have an existing website with design problems that you feel could be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take time and can be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if what needs doing requires editing code.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress website publishing platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We currently share more in-depth articles about 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 Design

WP themes are unique website design templates that let you easily change the look of your site in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking WP themes available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes created for WordPress are fully responsive and provide you with customizable options for changing your website’s design settings such as color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WordPress – Modular Scalability

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

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

Earlier in this post we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can cost you business.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be added to your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your whole site 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!

Want a plugin that will transform your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several WordPress 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 items to a cart, use discounts, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of great plugins that can be easily downloaded for free, or you can purchase quite inexpensively, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WordPress Plugins – Expanding Your Blog’s Features

WordPress – An Enhanced User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow web visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a rich and interactive user experience that will keep your visitors coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before making a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these consumers will simply move on to another business with a better website.

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

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