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 customers because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-built web site can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where looks matter, the look of your web site can affect the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that your potential buyers see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more than ever before to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we may jump online and go browse someone’s site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. How does your digital presence appear to them? Does it invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about what to do next?

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Help You Fix Your Poorly-Built Website?

Let’s review some of the key design issues that can affect your website’s results:

Website Design Issues

Typical web design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception of your site include:

  • Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to pick web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the colors you choose will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
  • Design Elements – Pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated or just plain hard to read text can easily turn prospects away from your site. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or excessive use of design elements.
  • Layout – How your site is arranged can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
  • Responsiveness – As information is now accessed using various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that your web design be responsive. If your web pages do not display well across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience potential business losses.

Website Functionality Issues

Common website functionality problems include the following:

  • Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where links don’t work, videos can’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across professionally. Your web presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. In some cases, these problems could be related to factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
  • Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors specific features and functionalities, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add products to a shopping cart, use coupons, pay using credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built website is the “user experience”.

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

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

  • Ease Of Use – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your service information should be easy to locate. Your customers 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. videos), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
  • Organized – If your site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but current clients also. Things like search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and sections where related content is grouped or linked together can provide users with an enjoyable experience.
  • Eye-Catching Features – Users stay longer on websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. To achieve this you need to strike a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links that direct customers to your product pages by inserting eye-catching images and well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
  • Interactive Site – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your site is providing interactive features that engage customers, such as allowing them 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 visitors to navigate quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
  • Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure 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 pages such as a contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of usage, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

Site design problems

(Website design problems)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting a website overhaul can take time and can end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you operate, especially if it requires a lot of web code editing.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website developed or overhauling an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using WordPress.

WordPress can help you improve your website results!

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We plan to provide more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress website publishing platform on this site, but here are just some key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress Themes – Instant Web Site Design

WordPress themes are unique web design templates that allow you to quickly change the look of your entire website without touching the site’s content and modifying any of the underlying software.

There are literally thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes available that can be easily downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they are extremely well priced, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

WP Themes

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are fully responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing the design on your website such as the color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, page 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.

You can learn about themes here:

WordPress – Powerful Functionality

Another great reason to choose the WordPress web site publishing software is that WordPress gives users modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your website to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier we looked at problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website can cost you business.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that you need integrated into your site, just install a plugin that will help you get the job done.

Need a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, images that aren’t showing or even alert you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can take immediate corrective action!

Need a plugin that will let you 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 goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, purchase using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of great plugins that can be downloaded at no cost, or are relatively inexpensive and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web development.

WP Plugins

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-built web site, WordPress can also help you give website users a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and plugins that allow web users to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered site, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep users returning to your site.

WP website design

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and better user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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