Custom website design vs template

As a business owner, digital marketing and having an online presence is essential for success. That’s why besides being active on social media, you need a hub where you can direct all your traffic to a website.

Your website serves as a 24/7 virtual employee, a salesperson, or even a conversions machine. Your website can help you inform your audience about what you offer and offer them your solution all on the same page.

That is why building a website is so important in business. But, knowing if to use a custom or template design, if to build it yourself, or hire a professional can be so stressful.

Why are you creating a website?

To know which option you should choose, you need to determine why you are building this website. Are you creating a website for your business or for your personal use? What features does your website need?

Most importantly you should ask yourself what business goals you want to achieve, what is your budget to complete your website, and how impactful is this to you?

The answers to these questions will help you determine your options.

Requirements of a good website

Let’s learn about the requirements of a good website because you need to know what you is a good website before you start making one.

The requirements of your website depend on the needs of your business. Like what features do you need, what your business offers.

But there are standard requirements such as good design and development, responsiveness, good user experience, and the website must be search engine friendly meaning that it will be optimized to show up on Google. 

Pros and cons of template based website design

Pros of templated sites

The main pro of using templated website designs is how easy it is to do. You can use easy drag and drop builders such as Wix or Squarespace to build websites in minutes or create a WordPress site to launch a blog.

You should use this option if you want something real quick, you are starting out, your budget is below $500, or if the website doesn’t impact your business.

Cons of template based websites

The effort you put into your website shows your clients how professional you are which can affect you negatively. Using website templates can be done by anyone meaning that you are going to look like everyone else and it will be hard to scale.

Most importantly, you aren’t a designer so in most cases you are going to feel like you don’t like the final product because you don’t know about design principles.

Pros and cons of custom website design

Pros of custom web design

A custom website is solely designed for you, it will fit your business brand and it will be tailored made to fit your business goals.

This is for you if you are at the scale part of your business or if you want to start your business the right way and you know that investing time and money will bring success to your business in the long run.

Cons of custom built website

To create custom sites, you will need a web developer even if you are using a content management system.

You need help to create a custom design and you will need a budget to do this.

Which one should you choose to build your site?

When building your website, it all depends on your needs, budget, and where you want to demonstrate. 

The decision is solely yours but you can go and see custom website designs on our website and see the difference.

We design all our websites from start to finish by using Adobe XD as our design tool and Webflow as our development tool.
Hope this helps you in your journey to becoming a successful business owner. Don’t forget to check out our other blogs here.