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 missing out on customers because of poor web design? A poorly-built website can end up costing you valuable business.

In a world where aesthetic principles matter, your website’s design can affect your business success. Your website is the first thing that your visitor sees and this could influence their decision to buy your products and use your services.

We typically do things online. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we still jump online and go browse somebody’s website before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web presence appear to them? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about where to go next?

The way your site looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to proceed with you.

Can WordPress Help Fix A Poorly-Built Web Site?

Let’s take a look at a few key design problems that can affect your site:

Website Design Issues

Common design issues that can impact a prospect’s perception about your site include:

  • Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you specify web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes to ensure that the palettes you use will display correctly across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
  • Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unexciting, outdated and just plain old ugly images can easily turn users off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements or overpowering use of design elements.
  • Layout – The way your site is structured can impact the way visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other elements are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
  • Responsiveness – As websites are now viewed using various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s vitally important that your website’s design be fully responsive. If your web pages do not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could lose customers.

Website Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues may include the following:

  • Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is landing on a site where links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are working at all times. Sometimes, problems may be caused by things like your hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that all problems are corrected immediately.
  • Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors certain features, then make sure that these functionalities 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 choose and add products to a cart, apply discounts, buy with credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in users mouths and lead to sharing their dissatisfaction in social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc., bringing you negative publicity.

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

  • User-Friendly – Your site needs to be user-friendly. Your product information should not be kept in obscure corners. Your prospective clients 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 content 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 content isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also existing clients. Having features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where your content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with a good experience.
  • Compelling Features – Customers want websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that are eye-catching. This means finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your website users. For example, highlight hyperlinks pointing to product pages by inserting eye-popping graphics alongside well-crafted descriptions. This is effective and can help you improve not just the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
  • User Interactivity – Another area that helps customers want to stay longer on your website is to provide interactive features that engage your users, such as features that let them\visitors 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 … Additionally, you want users to be able to navigate quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for faster loading pages is important.
  • Reassurance – One of the most important and often most neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel confident interacting with you online. To reassure your potential clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal compliance pages like a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

Website design problems

(Website design issues)

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 built, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also some of existing customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you have an existing website with design issues that you feel may be affecting your business?

First, understand that getting problems addressed on an existing site can take some time and can end up being quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently operate, especially if it requires rewriting code extensively.

If you are in the process of having a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you consider choosing the WordPress web content publishing platform.

WordPress can improve your website results!

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently publish a lot more in-depth articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few key points to keep in mind about why you should seriously choose WordPress:

WordPress – Unique Website Design Features

WP themes are unique website design template systems that let you completely change the look and feel of your entire site with the click of a mouse button.

There are thousands of professionally designed WP themes available that can be downloaded. Many of these are either freely available, or they can be purchased quite cheaply, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

WordPress Themes

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design settings like color, elements like menus, headers, footers and styles, 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 works for your business.

You can learn about themes here:

Plugins – Virtually Unlimited Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides users with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate with your site to provide you with almost unlimited flexibility.

Earlier in this post we discussed problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site can end up losing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a feature that you need to integrate into your website, just install a plugin that will get the job done.

Need a plugin that will notify you about any issues detected with your site such as links not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your entire web site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about problems so you can correct these immediately!

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

And just like WordPress themes, there are literally thousands of great plugins for WordPress users that you can download and install on your site and are freely available, or that are extremely affordable and will save you hundreds of dollars on the cost of website development.

WP Plugins

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about WordPress plugins here:

WordPress – An Interactive User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you provide site visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all needs and uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-powered website, WP themes, plugins and great content, you can create a a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them coming back for more.

WP web design

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

Hopefully, this information 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 please see other posts we have published on this site.

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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now

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Originally published as Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?.