Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Are you missing out on prospects because of a poorly-designed web site? A poorly-built web site could lose you many new customers.

In a world where beautiful design sells, your website’s design can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a visitor sees and this could affect their decision to do business with you.

Think about how you do research about products and services nowadays. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s website before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your prospect’s perspective. How does your digital presence appear to them? Does your site invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them confused and cautious about what to do next?

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

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s review some of the more important design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Website Design Problems

Some common design issues that can influence your potential customer’s perception about your site include:

• Color – Clashing color schemes affect your results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web colors to make sure that the color schemes you select will display predictably across various systems. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically boring, outdated and just plain old ugly visual elements can easily result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in the design elements and excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can significantly impact how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other orientation features such as search boxes are used, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since digital information is now viewed through a range of devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may incur potential business losses.

Site Functionality Issues

Typical functionality problems include the following:

• Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a website where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos can’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable in any website, especially when your aim is to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your online presence reflects your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are up and running all the time. Sometimes, problems are related to factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to ensure that you’re always proactive and that you get problems fixed immediately.
• Feature limitations – If your business offers visitors certain features, then make sure that these are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products on your site, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a shopping cart, enter discounts, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Invariably, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed site is the “user experience”.

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

Typical problems that can lead to a disappointing user experience can include some of following:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate around in. Your product information should be easy to find. Your prospective clients want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. videos), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but current customers as well. Features such as descriptive links, product and service categories and sections where your content is grouped or linked together provides users with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stay longer on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. To accomplish this you need a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks that point to your product pages with eye-popping photos or illustrations next to well-crafted descriptions. This can be very effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you generate more sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another thing that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to move quickly through your site and access your data without waiting around for content 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 ensure that users feel confident doing business with you online. To reassure your web visitors that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your site includes legal pages like a business contact page, privacy policy, terms and conditions of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Web site design problems)

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

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

First, be aware that getting problems corrected on an existing site can take some time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently own, especially if what needs doing requires a lot of web code writing.

If you are currently considering having a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider using WordPress.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We plan to share a lot more information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

Themes – Instant Website Design

WordPress themes are unique website design templates that let you quickly change the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the website’s content or changing the core software functionality.

There are thousands of professionally designed themes available that you can download and easily install on your website. Many themes are either free, or they are extremely affordable, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

(WP Themes)

Most WordPress themes are fully responsive and provide users with highly customizable options for changing your site’s design settings such as the color, template elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress an ideal tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here: WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Scalability

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides users with modular features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited 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 could end up costing you customers.

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

Need a plugin that will let you know about any issues with your website such as links not working, audios not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even alert you if your entire site has gone down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a cart, apply discounts, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic plugins created for WordPress site owners that can be downloaded at no cost, or you can buy for a inexpensive cost, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about plugins here: Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Website With Plugins

WordPress – An Engaging Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you give your visitors a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of applications and plugins that allow customers to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very a highly interactive user experience that will keep users returning to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with a focus on the customer, these prospective customers will simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better 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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