Your business website plays a major role in your brand’s online presence.
A well-designed website gives a good impression to your prospective customers. Not only this, it allows you to nurture your leads thereby resulting in more conversions. Therefore, you can’t afford any website failure or else your customers may bounce off your website.
A website has to be designed to ensure a good user experience. Today’s audience is smart, they judge businesses within seconds. So you obviously want to make a positive first impression.
Have you decided to invest in a new website for your business? Do you prefer a pre-designed template or custom designed? Don’t get confused, we are here to help you with this.
Let’s first understand what is pre-designed and custom-built designs. Then we will move forward with their pros and cons.
Website Templates
A template site is an ideal option if the project is simple. The easiest way to start a website is to set up a WordPress site and apply a template that is purchased from third parties like ThemeForest, Template Monster, or Elegant Themes, etc.
Many website templates have been pre designed by the developers. They can be purchased by third parties for developing websites quickly. The built-in features ultimately weigh down the load speed as well as SEO performance.
The template codes are available to the one who purchases them. There packages that can be installed and configured, they get updated on a regular basis. You sometimes also get technical support for the installation and configuration of the templates.
The major issue with pre-designed templates is that other users also buy the same template that you purchase. Therefore, your website will look quite similar to a few other websites. In this case, standing out becomes a challenging affair.
Pros of Template websitesThe initial cost of purchasing the template is low. However, customization makes it costly.The overall development time is less. All you have to do is add content, create texts and picturesQuick and cost-effective deployment as hosting service providers give inexpensive plans in order to host a template websiteHigh return on investmentEasy maintenance as it involves only text and pictures.
Cons of TemplatesNo uniqueness as the same pre-designed template is used by other customers as well.You get limited functions and pre-packaged features.No dynamic data is present and that makes the website a little monotonous.Search engines like Google and Bing have certain guidelines but a template can’t satisfy as it is not optimized for SEO.
Although templates are created to give the wow effect using design tricks. They have appealing colors, beautiful graphics, and impressive animation. These templates are best for displaying static information but they are helpless when it comes to serving dynamic information like stock prices, sales promotions, etc. Today, websites require functionalities having dynamic data as it is the need of the hour. Besides this, SEO is another major concern. For getting ranked prominently by popular search engines like Google and Bing, they don’t support all elements that include title, meta tags, keywords, etc.
Next, we move on to the custom-designed website.
Custom built websites
A custom-tor made website is tailor-made for your organization. Having a unique design, the functionality adheres to specific requirements. Therefore, it makes it easy for you to stand out from your competition.
Custom-built websites come with the thought process regarding your target audience, how you want the website to function and how you want the complete website to function.
Personalized websites are way better than pre-built templates. This is because it is able to optimize the website during creation to allow search engines to read every page. This gives the end-user a more relevant search result going far beyond the keyword research. Therefore the custom-built websites give a better ranking.
Custom-built designs are responsive regardless of the devices. Building the website from the scratch gives you the opportunity to adjust the pitch. If you are not satisfied with the first draft, you can optimize as per your requirements. Although the cost of these designs is a bit higher and it takes a little longer to build these websites, the final product is amazing.
Pros of custom-built design:Goal-oriented as custom-built has every function you require.As codes are controlled by a professional team, you can make the changes accordingly.When updated constantly, custom websites are more secure compared to template designs.The custom designs are highly responsive.Being highly flexible, you adjust the website as per your marketing strategies.
Cons of custom built websiteHigh initial costFor guaranteed responsiveness and high security, it requires a fixed maintenance cost.It may take from a few weeks to months to create a custom-made website.
Template design or custom design website: Which one to prefer?
The obvious answer is custom design.
Your branding is powerful when the complete website is specifically optimized in a way that it fulfills your requirements while supporting your brand in a consistent way.
In the nutshell, a website is a very powerful tool when designed in the right manner. But if you have executed it poorly, it may work against you. Regardless of the types of business that you have, custom websites are way better than pre-designed templates in the long run.