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

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can be very important to the success of your business. Your website is the first thing that a potential buyer sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research products nowadays. Even if it’s only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse somebody’s website first before buying goods in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your customer’s position. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and cautious 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 are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ experience and their decision to buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some of the more important design issues that can affect your web site’s results and performance:

Web Site Design Issues

Some of the most common design problems that can influence your prospect’s perception about your website include some or all of the following:

  • Color – Poor color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are methods that can help you pick web colors correctly and even safe web color palettes you can use to make sure that the color schemes you use will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a professional web designer.
  • Design Elements – Pages that contain visually unpleasant, outdated or just plain ugly graphics can result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by overall design inconsistencies and excessive use of design elements.
  • Layout – The way your content is structured can significantly impact the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational menus, links, and other useful elements are used, where menus are positioned on your site, page columns, etc ….
  • Responsiveness – As business information is now viewed through various devices with different-sized browsers, it’s important that your web design be responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose opportunities.

Functionality Problems

Some of the most common website functionality issues include:

  • Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics aren’t displaying. Subpar functionality is no longer acceptable, especially if your goal is to come across as a professional and dependable business. Your digital presence reflects your company. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and graphics are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, problems could be caused by factors such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems as soon as possible.
  • Feature limitations – If your site offers visitors certain features and functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you want to sell products online, make sure that you provide customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, apply discount codes, complete their orders using credit cards or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, the area that most suffers due to a poorly-designed website is the “user experience”.

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

Typical problems that can cause a disappointing user experience include:

  • User-Friendly – Your site needs to be easy to use and intuitive to navigate around in. Information about your products and services should not be hard to find. Your site visitors 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 information to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
  • Organized – If your site isn’t cleanly organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential clients but also current customers. Things such as descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clearly-defined areas where related content is grouped or linked together will help provide users with a good experience.
  • Eye-Catching Web Site – Users want sites that are easy to use, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires finding a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks that direct customers to product pages with eye-catching graphics and well-written product descriptions. This is very effective and can help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also grow your sales and conversions.
  • Engaging Site – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage visitors, such as allowing them to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to browse quickly through your site and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
  • Compliance – One of the most important and often neglected aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure 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 that your website includes legal compliance pages such as a contact page, privacy statement, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

Website design problems

(Web design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your website isn’t designed in a user-friendly way, you run the serious risk of not only losing prospective paying customers but also your current customers too.

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

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also end up being somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently own, especially if it requires modifying web code extensively.

If you are currently considering getting a new website built or redesigning an existing website, then we recommend that you consider building or redesigning your website with WordPress.

WordPress can help improve your website results!

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

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

WP Themes – Instant Website Design

WP themes are unique web site design template systems that allow you to completely modify the look and feel of your entire website in minutes.

There are thousands of professional looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or are relatively cheap to purchase, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

WP Themes

(WordPress Themes)

Most WP themes nowadays are responsive and provide users with highly customizable features for changing the design of your website such as the color, elements like headers and footers, page layouts and more. Themes are just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

WordPress Plugins – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to choose the WP web content publishing software is that WordPress provides users with powerful functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

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

Earlier in this article we looked at areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built website can lose you potential clients.

WordPress plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature you want to add to your website, just install a WP plugin that does what you want your site to do.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any issues on your site such as links not working, audios not streaming, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire web 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 site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several WP plugins that will help you sell products on your site and provide your customers with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discount coupons, pay using credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

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

WP Plugins

(WP Plugins)

Learn more about WP plugins here:

WordPress – An Immediate User Experience

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

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and interactive user experience that will keep users coming back for more.

WP web design

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed with customers in mind, these consumers will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website or better website experience.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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Originally published as Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?.