Are you losing customers because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-constructed web site could lose you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the look of your web site can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how most people do research about businesses nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s website first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s perspective. How does your web presence appear to them? Does your site invite people to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

How your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ perceptions and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the main design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Website Design Problems

Some common web design problems that can affect your visitor’s perception of your site include some or all of the following:

• Color – Unattractive color combinations can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to help make sure that the palettes you want to use will display correctly across various web formats. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain uninteresting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can affect the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur significant business opportunity losses.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working all the time. In some cases, problems are caused by external things such as your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems are addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, apply discounts, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where prospective customers suffer most because of a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A disappointing user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment across social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common issues that can create a bad user experience include:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure places. Your potential buyers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Features such as search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where related content can be easily found provides users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Website – Visitors stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to product pages with beautiful graphics beside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Site – Another area that helps customers decide to stick around on your site is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … Additionally, you want users to navigate quickly around your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your prospective customers that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can lead to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the risk of not only losing potential paying customers but also your current customers too.

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

First, keep in mind that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you have, especially if it requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently in the process of having a new website built or upgrading an existing site, then we recommend that you consider using the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress platform on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique website design template systems that enable you to immediately change the look and feel of your site without touching the website’s content or modifying any underlying site functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

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

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes

Plugins – Modular Expansion

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a functionality you need integrated into your website, just install a plugin that will do what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your site such as hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will 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 goods or services on your site and provide your visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, enter discounts, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that can be downloaded for free, or that are relatively cheap to buy and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Expand Your Web Site’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 provide website visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and plugins that allow site visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep them coming back to your site.

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 and engaging user experience, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them 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 using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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