Are you losing business because of poor web design? A poorly-designed website can cost you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can contribute significantly to your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your prospective client sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

We typically do things online. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will instinctively switch on our mobile device and go browse a web site first before purchasing something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to online users? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to purchase from you.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Designed Website?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Web Site Design Issues

Typical design issues that can affect a prospect’s perception of your website include:

• Color – Poor color combinations can affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the palettes you use will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your page content can impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may experience potential loss of customers.

Functionality Problems

Common website functionality issues may include:

• Frequent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Persistent errors are not acceptable on any website, especially when you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and images remain working at all times. In some cases, these problems are related to external things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues corrected immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your site provides visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a cart, use coupons, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where visitors suffer most because of a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their frustrations on social networks, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Typical problems that can lead to a bad user experience include the following:

• Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your prospective customers 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. spreadsheets), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organization – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but current customers also. Having features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found can provide visitors with an enjoyable user experience.
• Compelling Web Site – Customers stick around on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight links pointing to your product pages by inserting professionally-taken product pictures and well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your website, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps users want to stay longer on your site is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as allowing them to leave comments, 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 browse quickly within your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so site speed optimization is important.
• Reassuring Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages like a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing prospective customers but also some of existing customers as well.

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

First, keep in mind that getting problems fixed on an existing site can take time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if it requires a lot of code editing.

If you are currently researching the process of having a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we highly recommend that you consider using the WordPress web publishing platform.

(WordPress can help 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 choose WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design templates that allow you to instantly modify the look of your website with just a few mouse clicks.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes available that you can install on your site. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with customizable features for changing design settings on your website such as color, elements like menus, headers, footers and typography, layouts and more. Themes are 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.

You can learn about themes here:

• A Newbie’s Guide To WordPress Themes

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another compelling reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress provides users with almost unlimited features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate easily with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we talked about issues in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website could lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature you need to add to your website, just install a plugin that will get things done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues detected with your site like links not working, videos not streaming, graphics that aren’t showing or even tell you if your whole 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 website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are literally tens of thousands of useful plugins that you can download and install on your site at $0 cost, or you can purchase for a relatively reasonable cost, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

• WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Web Site’s Capability

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address problems caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you provide your 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 web visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep your visitors returning again and again.

As stated earlier, consumers will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, these consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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