When designing a website for your business, there are many factors to take into consideration.
Arguably, one of the most important ones is deciding between a custom web design or working with a generic template.
Either decision has its own set of advantages and challenges, but any web design agency worth its salt would recommend a professionally made one, especially for smaller businesses or brands within a niche sector.
The main reason for this is search engine optimization or SEO. Custom websites, though initially more expensive than a set of generic templates, are tailored for your brand needs and are therefore more cost-effective in the long run.
Prior to designing your website, a professional web design agency will ask you about your company goals, target market, brand direction, and more.
From these, they will gain an idea of the ideal user experience and design a customer-centric website that helps visitors easily navigate around your page and respond to call to action prompts.
For example, if your business is more service-oriented, such as a waxing or beauty salon, you’d want your homepage to have an easily identifiable and clickable “request service” form to drive leads and convert customers.
A professionally made website gives you this opportunity, whereas a template may not necessarily offer the same function.
Even if you’re working with a limited budget, you should consider investing in a professionally made website to build better brand credibility and ensure an effective conversion rates at the get-go.
Remember that your business website is often the first point of contact between you and your customer.
If you have a poorly designed or clunky user interface, you risk potential clients avoiding your brand simply because of a bad first impression.
This article explores the three primary advantages of a professionally made website over generic website templates.
Custom Designs Efficiently Promote Your Brand
According to the Small Business Association (SBA), over 600,000 new businesses are opened each year globally, with more than half of those building their unique websites to attract new customers.
Combine that with already-established businesses targeting your audience, and you have steep competition to consider.
To stand out from the crowd, you need to level out the playing field online with a professionally made website that reflects your brand.
Generic website templates, as their name suggests, uses pre-made layouts, color palette, and graphics that may be paid or free to use for everyone.
While they can be faster to deploy, these templates may not capture your brand’s exact visual style and may lack the features that your company requires to convert.
On the other hand, a custom website will be tailored to your brand’s aesthetics, presenting a more accurate representation of your company’s vision.
A custom website will also have the exact features that your business requires to convert visitors into paying customers and clients.
A Professionally Made Website Increases Search Engine Optimization
A custom web design enables more robust search engine optimization. Working with a professional web design agency, you can design a site that ranks higher in all major search engines.
The reason for this is that you can craft better metadata, page URLs, alt tags for images, and any other site content that improves your ranking.
A professionally made website is also designed to be both user- and mobile-friendly.
This is particularly important, as experts note that over 60 percent of all organic search traffic is made from a mobile phone (Statistica, 2022), and around 40 percent of users will leave a site if it is not mobile responsive (Impact, 2022).
The mobile-friendliness of your site, along with your site content data, has a cumulative effect on how well you rank on a search engine.
The higher your website scores on a search engine’s unique algorithm, the better your chances are of being visible on their first search results page.
Custom Websites Come With Customer Support
With custom web design, you gain immediate access to a professional web design team who will troubleshoot any issues that may occur on your website.
This is an important consideration since you never know when your website would suddenly crash or have a malfunctioning UI element.
It’s vital that your website functions well at all times so you can continue to attract new customers and maintain a good relationship with existing ones.
Additionally, having a great web design agency by your side means that you are constantly updated on the best industry practices and can easily incorporate new features into your webpage.
After all, constant improvements keep your business competitive and relevant to your specific industry.
This is crucial for startups who may want to add more products or services to their portfolio as time goes by.
A professionally made website can be built to adjust to the company’s growth–something that a generic website cannot do.
Ultimately, a custom website design gives you the freedom to scale the development process.
Compared to generic website templates that can provide you with a decent-looking site but may lack individuality and support, professionally made websites can meet your company’s needs and help you achieve your business goals.
A great web design agency helps you initially set up the proper architecture while also creating a roadmap of how your site can further develop.
Not only does this remove the stress of thinking about what to do with your website when your business expands, but also empowers you to implement improvements to your site with consistent branding elements and innovative products and services.