Custom versus template: Which way to go with your web design

A web site designer who dresses up a template and sells it to a client isn’t really a designer at all. Hiring a designer who sells you a template defeats the purpose of hiring a designer in the first place. Because a website template not only looks amateur, unoriginal and plain – it can also be hard to customise and edit once your site has gone live.

A huge part of being successful in business is having something unique to offer your customers. Whether it’s your product, your customer service, your pricing or after sale care – whatever it is, you should be trying to distinguish your business from your competitors.

So why would you let your web site designer lump you with a distinctly unoriginal website? If you were serious about your business and realistic about how important it is to differentiate your brand within your market, you probably wouldn’t.

What you would do, or should do, is ensure your website is as unique and original as you want your business to be. The way to do this is to make sure you work with a design and development company who can offer custom web design services.

Custom designed sites should look and feel exactly how you want them to. Not only do they look more sophisticated and better lend themselves to branding and interesting graphic design elements, but they offer the website’s owned a greater degree of control over content and changes.

There’s very little sense in paying for a website that effectively locks you out of being able to add, edit and moderate once it’s gone live. Unfortunately, this is what many template designs do – and this is what many businesses end up opting for on account of the cheaper prices involved in the “design” and development process.

The flexibility and overall better quality (in terms of both the appearance of your site and its functionality) isn’t just good for you, the business owner. There’s no denying the fact that consumers prefer looking at and browsing custom sites over bland old templates. People naturally respond more to original design and content than they do to just another iteration of a hackneyed old style.