Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

This tutorial explains some of the issues and problems caused by having a poorly-designed website and how WordPress can help fix poor web design.

WordPressAre you losing prospects because of a poorly-constructed website? No matter how professional your company is, a poorly-built website can cost you valuable business.

In a world where the way we project ourselves matter, the look of your web site can be very important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your web visitor sees and this could affect their purchasing decision.

Think about how you do research about products nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will instinctively fire up our laptop and go visit somebody’s web site before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your web presence appear to others? Does it invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about where to go next?

What your customers see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can influence your web visitors’ perceptions and their decision to engage with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Poor Web Design?

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

Web Design Issues

Common web design problems that can impact your visitor’s perception of your website include:

  • Color – Bad color schemes can affect your website’s results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to help make sure that the colors you want to use will display correctly across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
  • Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unpleasant, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies and overpowering use of design elements.
  • Layout – How you structure your pages can affect the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation items, links, and other useful objects.
  • Responsiveness – Since online information is now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant business opportunity losses.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common functionality problems can include:

  • Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and reliable business. Your website reflects your organization. It’s important to ensure that all your links, videos, and images remain working all the time. Sometimes, problems could be related to things such as 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 all problems immediately.
  • Feature limitations – If your site provides users specific functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you intend to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily choose and add items to a cart, enter coupons, complete purchases using a credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, the area that most suffers because of a poorly-designed web site is the “user experience”.

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

Here are just some of the more common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

  • Ease Of Use – Your website needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Your product information should not be kept in obscure areas. 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. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
  • Organization – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective customers but also current customers. Features such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and well-organized sections where your content can be easily found can help provide visitors with a good user experience.
  • Compelling Features – Visitors want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your users. For example, highlight hyperlinks that point to your product pages by inserting eye-catching photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
  • Engaging Features – Another aspect that helps customers want to stick around on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your customers, such as features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for pages to load, so site speed optimization is important.
  • Reassurance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, affiliate disclaimers, etc.

Site design problems

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, understand that getting issues addressed on an existing website can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of code editing.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or redeveloping an existing website, then we highly suggest that you consider using WordPress.

WordPress can help improve your website results!

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to share more information about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Customizable Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to immediately modify the look of your entire site without touching the site’s content and changing any core software.

There are thousands of professional themes for WordPress users available that you can install on your site. Many of these are either free of charge, or they are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

WordPress Themes

(WP Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide website owners with flexible and customizable features for changing your site’s design such as the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, 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 ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here:

Plugins – Powerful Scalability

Another great reason to choose the WordPress web content management platform is that WordPress gives users powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this post we discussed issues like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site can lose you prospective customers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these issues quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you would like integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues on your website like links not working, audios not playing, pictures that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire site 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 business solution? Again, no problem! There are several plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, apply coupons, buy using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that you can install on your website at $0 cost, or that are relatively cheap to purchase, once again, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

WordPress Plugins

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

WordPress – A Rich Website User Experience

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

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

WP website design

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

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues 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 web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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