Are you missing out on business because of poor web design? A poorly-built web site can cost you valuable business.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design is very important to your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your prospective customer sees and this can affect their decision to use your services.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still switch on our mobile phone and go visit someone’s site before making our next move.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web site appear to online users? Does your site invite people to approach and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s review some of the main design issues that can affect your web site:

Website Design Problems

Some of the most common design problems that can affect a user’s perception of your website include the following:

• Color – Bad color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you want to use will display consistently across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain visually unattractive, outdated or just plain old hard to read typefaces can turn prospective clients off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way your pages are arranged can have a significant effect on the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to fit your information across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose customers.

Functionality Issues

Some common website functionality issues can include some or all of the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a site where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are not acceptable, especially if your aim is to come across as a professional. Your online presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics remain up and running at all times. In some cases, problems may be related to things like your hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get problems addressed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add products to a cart, use discounts, purchase using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction on social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

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

• User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. 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 files.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but existing clients too. Things like descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together will provide users with a good experience.
• Stimulating Features – Customers stick around on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to hyperlinks pointing to your product pages with beautiful graphics alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps customers decide to stay longer on your website is providing interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let users leave comments, 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 visitors to navigate quickly through your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site loading optimization 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 visitors that your business is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Web design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute 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 serious risk of not only losing prospective paying clients but also some of existing clients as well.

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

First, understand that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you own, especially if the work requires a lot of code editing.

If you are researching the process of having a new website developed or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress website management platform.

(WordPress can help to improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Inexpensive Website Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you instantly change the look of your site with the click of a mouse button.

There are literally thousands of professional themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide you with highly customizable features for changing your website’s design settings like color, elements like menus, headers, footers, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about themes here:

• Themes – An Overview

WP Plugins – Powerful Features

Another great reason to build your site using WordPress is that WordPress gives you powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

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

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be in your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you want your website to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your website like links not working, audios not streaming, images that are missing or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems 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 solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, buy with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins built for WordPress users that you can install on your website for free, or that are relatively cheap to buy, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WP plugins here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow website users to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep people returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, these consumers will 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 web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress content management software please see our related posts section.

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