Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website can end up costing you prospective new customers and a lot of money.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this can affect their decision to purchase from you.

Think about how most people do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we will switch on our smart phone and go browse someone’s site first before buying something in-store or online.

Now, try to see things from your visitor’s point of view. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious 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’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Site Design Problems

Some of the most common web design issues that can influence a prospect’s perception of your site include the following:

• Color – Unattractive color schemes affect your site’s results. This also applies to 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 correctly across different systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain unpleasant, outdated and just plain old hard to read typefaces can turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can significantly impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – As information is now viewed by various devices with different-sized screens, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will incur business losses.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues can include:

• Persistent site errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable for a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. Sometimes, these issues are caused by things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that you get issues addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site provides users certain functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, use discounts, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where customers suffer most due to a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment across social networks, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and easy to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. 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 information to your site (e.g. PDF price lists), make sure that visitors 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 prospective clients but existing clients as well. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together can help provide users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Features – Users stay longer on websites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your users. For example, highlight links which point to your product pages by inserting beautiful images alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is effective and will help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but also grow your sales and conversions.
• Interactive Site – Another thing that helps users decide to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to move quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Reassurance – 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 visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web 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 web site isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also existing customers as well.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you operate, especially if the work requires rewriting web code extensively.

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

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more posts about WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Inexpensive Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to immediately modify the look and feel of your website with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either free of charge, or they can be bought relatively cheaply, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing design settings of your website like color, elements like headers and footers, 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 ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WP themes here:

• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Features

Another compelling reason to choose the WordPress website management platform is that WordPress gives you expandable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could cost you money.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your website, just install a plugin that does what you need to get things done.

Want a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues detected with your website like links not working, videos not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert 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 take immediate corrective action!

Need 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 on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter coupons, complete their transactions with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of useful plugins for WordPress that can be downloaded free of charge, or are extremely well priced, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Add New Features And Functionality To Your Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your customers.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and plugins that allow website users to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a a highly interactive user experience that will keep users returning for more.

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

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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