Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Are you losing business because of a poorly-constructed website? A poorly-designed website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where appearances matter, the look of your website can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a web visitors see and this can affect their decision to purchase.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if it’s only preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse a web site before taking the next step.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s viewpoint. How does your website appear to them? Does your site invite people to enter and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and cautious about where to go next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other things than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their decision to engage and do business with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix Bad Web Design?

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

Site Design Problems

Typical web design problems that can impact your visitor’s perception about your site include some following:

• Color – Bad color combinations affect your site’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to choose web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to make sure that the palettes you use will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically uninteresting, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can result in users quickly losing interest in off your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you lay out your content can affect how users interact with your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – Since information is now viewed using a range of devices with different-sized screens, it’s important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your website does not resize automatically to work across all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could experience potential business opportunity losses.

Website Functionality Problems

Common website functionality problems include the following:

• Persistent errors – A huge turn-off for users is landing on a page where some hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent errors are not acceptable on a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional and dependable company. Your digital presence is a reflection of your company. It’s important to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, these issues are caused by things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always proactive and that you get issues addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your web site offers visitors specific functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add products to a shopping cart, use discount codes, pay with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

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

An unpleasant user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to vent their disappointment on social sites, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

• Ease Of Use – Your site should be easy to use and easy to navigate. Information about your products and services should be easy to locate. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. PDF forms and documents), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective clients but current customers too. Providing features like search engine-friendly URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content is grouped or linked together will provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Visitors stay longer on sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with stimulating options. To accomplish this you need to strive for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links pointing to product pages with professionally-taken photos or illustrations alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
• User Interactivity – Another aspect that helps users decide to stay longer on your site is to provide interactive features that engage your visitors, such as features that let users leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want visitors to browse 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 ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make 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 that your site includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

(Site design issues)

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

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

First, keep in mind that getting issues fixed on an existing site can take time and can end up being fairly costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if the work requires changing a lot of code.

If you are considering getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we highly recommend that you consider choosing WordPress.

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

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

Themes – Flexible Web Design

WordPress themes are unique web site design templates that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your entire site without affecting the website’s content and modifying any of the core software functionality.

There are literally thousands of great-looking WP themes available that you can install on your website. Many of these are either free, or are relatively cheap to buy, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide users with customizable options for changing design settings of your website like color, elements like headers and footers, layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress such a great tool for helping you achieve a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about WordPress themes here: WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

WordPress – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using the WP content management software is that WordPress provides users with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed web site could cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily. If there is a functionality you would like integrated with your website, just install a WordPress plugin that does exactly what you want to get things done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems on your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, graphics that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole website has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

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 WordPress 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 cart, enter discount coupons, order with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are thousands of fantastic plugins that you can download and install on your website free of charge, or that can be bought for a relatively reasonable price and will save you thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here: Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-constructed website, WordPress can also help you give site users a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and enhanced user experience that will keep your visitors coming back to your website.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do extensive research online before making purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with the customer in mind, consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website and user experience.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP CMS platform please see our related posts section.

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Disclaimer: We are not associated with WordPress, Automattic, or any of the products reviewed on this website. We may receive financial benefits from the purchase of third-party services or products advertised on this website. All images are the copyright of their respective owners and comply with all license terms and agreements of use.

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