The top 5 reasons you should invest in a Custom Website
With options like Squarespace and Shopify promising quick and easy websites, it can make you question why businesses invest in custom websites.
Never shy of being controversial, here are our top five ways a custom website adds value to your business.
It differentiates you from your competitors
While convenient, templated websites often make everyone look the same. There are many beautiful options out there however website templates are designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. They often feature a generic structure, barely-there aesthetic and obligatory, often irrelevant content blocks. By designing a custom website, we’re able to craft an approach that exactly meets the needs of your target market. Having a unique website look and feel keeps you from resembling every other business in your niche. This positions your business as an innovator or changemaker making you an appealing choice for a customer comparing their options.
It perfectly serves your business’ goals
Have you ever landed on a website, scrolled through to the bottom and realised you know nothing about the business? A custom website allows you to structure content in a strategic and directive way to best drive the customer journey. By bringing focus to key information, your user knows exactly what your business can do, an essential pre-requisite for making a purchase. A custom website gives you more opportunity to track your users’ behavior and re-organise content if required. For example, if you receive questions about your business location, it’s easy to move your address and review the impact. Also, it’s important to consider how your website will function responsively. It’s not just about adapting your content- depending on your user, you may have different content on your desktop and mobile websites.
Your website has a level of future-proofing
When building a website, it’s important to consider it’s longevity. A custom website allows for better scalability and grows as an investment in your business. Templates are designed for every possible scenario which leads to bloated, slow-loading code that can bog down a website. We approach development by only using the code we need to keep things running smoothly. This also helps us diagnose errors as we’re able to investigate our code knowing it’s structured in a best-practice way. A custom website is also often easier to adapt for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) practices, keeping your digital marketing efforts efficient.
It’s all in the (technical) details
It’s completely normal for a website to encounter an error at some point. Custom websites allow you to ‘better the devil you know’ when it comes to diagnosing problems and fixing issues. While we’ve seen every website-builder in the book, some themes work in mysterious ways. The most skilled developer can take time (and therefore, money) to work out a bug or change functionality within a template. This becomes an issue when you integrate a website with other elements- templates aren’t often built with adaptability in mind. A custom website means we’re across all the moving parts and can best optimise your site no matter the situation.
E-commerce can be a complicated beast
Anyone that’s built an online store can testify to the number of moving parts needed for it to run smoothly. Managing stock levels, ensuring security and implementing third party plug-ins are just a few elements that go into running an e-commerce website. Having a custom website that is optimised for checkout and conversion makes the transaction process more appealing and pleasant for your customers. Our Aftercare and support plans can also give you the support you need (and help with changes).
Excited about the prospect of a custom website for your business? We hear you! But when is the right time to invest? For the best custom website outcome, we recommend that you have a few customers under your belt and really understand your target market. Coming to us before you know your business inside and out makes establishing clear website goals tricky.
Ready for a custom website of your very own? Contact us now and let’s get the magic started.