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 business because of poor web design? A poorly-constructed website can end up losing you many new customers.

In a world where first impressions matter, the design of your web site is becoming more important to your business success. Your website is the first thing that your visitors see and this can influence their purchasing decision.

People are now turning more and more to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still switch on our smart phone and go visit a website before deciding what to do next.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to visitors? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make them confused and unsure about what to do next?

What visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see in your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can influence your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to proceed with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s review a few key design problems that can affect your site’s results:

Web Design Problems

Some of the most common design issues that can influence a visitor’s perception of your website include some following:

  • Color – Unattractive color schemes can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are tools to pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to ensure that the color combinations you choose will display predictably across different web formats. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
  • Design Elements – Web pages that contain unattractive, outdated or just plain old hard to read text can turn users off your website. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic element choices or excessive use of design elements.
  • Layout – The way your content is structured can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigation menus, links, and other useful assistive elements such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
  • Responsiveness – As websites are now accessed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose customers.

Website Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems may include:

  • Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images aren’t displaying. Persistent site errors are no longer acceptable, especially when your aim is to come across professionally. Your online presence is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running at all times. In some cases, these issues may be caused by things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems corrected as soon as possible.
  • Feature limitations – If your business offers users certain functionality, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, use discounts, complete their orders using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-constructed web site is the “user experience”.

A poor user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead them to share their disappointment in social sites, user forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

  • Ease Of Use – Your website must be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be kept in obscure corners. Your visitors 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 files to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
  • Organized – If your site isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but existing customers too. Having features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and clean areas where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide visitors with a good experience.
  • Compelling Web Site – Visitors stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are stimulating. To achieve this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links pointing to your product pages by inserting eye-popping images next to 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.
  • User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, like 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 … Additionally, you want users to move quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
  • Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often 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 you are 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, earnings disclaimers, etc.

Web site design problems

(Web site design problems)

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

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

First, be aware that getting a complete website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if the work requires extensive web coding.

If you are considering getting a new website built or overhauling an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web site management platform.

WordPress can help you improve your website results!

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more in-depth information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just some things to keep in mind about why you should use WordPress:

Themes – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique web design template systems that allow you to quickly modify the look and feel of your entire site without touching the website’s content and modifying any of the core software.

There are literally thousands of professional themes created for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either free, or they are relatively inexpensive, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

WordPress Themes

(WordPress Themes)

Most WordPress themes are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a powerful tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

WP Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress gives you scalable functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited features.

Earlier in this post we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website could cost you potential buyers.

WP plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality that needs to be integrated into your site, just install a plugin that will do what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected with your site such as links not working, videos not streaming, images that aren’t showing or even tell you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, complete purchases with credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

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

WP Plugins

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

WordPress – An Immediate Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-constructed web site, WordPress can also help you provide your site users with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautifully-designed and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and functional plugins that allow 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 and immediate user experience that will keep visitors returning for more.

WordPress website design

As we’ve previously stated, consumers do research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich user experience, consumers will not return and 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 expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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