For anyone with a limited budget setting up a website using a drag-and-drop website builder is a great solution. That being said, this choice does come with drawbacks. If you’ve been left wanting from drag-and-drop website builders like Wix or Squarespace, it might be time your business graduated to custom web design and development solution.
Here are five benefits of custom website design and development:
1. Website Design Tailored to Your Branding
Like brick-and-mortar establishments, websites provide businesses with an opportunity to showcase not only their unique products and services but also their personality. Through custom web design and development, a business can partner with an agency’s design team to give their website a personalized touch and a unique user experience that is not limited to what most drag-and-drop templates offer.
Life’s too short to be using the same templates, color schemes, and icons as everyone else.
2. Customer Experience-Optimized Design
Website customization also enables a business to build a site focused on delivering real business results via an optimal structure and user experience. Prior to developing and designing a website, your web design agency should be asking you about your business goals. Likewise, you’ll want to have an idea of the customer journey with regards to your product or service. For instance, if you’re running an automotive repair business, you’d likely want your homepage to have a “request service” form front and center to drive leads.
Bottom-line: Design a customer-centric website that helps visitors to navigate the site easily and take actions that produce your desired results.
Example of customer-centric design
3. Increased Search Engine Optimization
Another benefit of custom website design is that it enables better search engine optimization. Thankfully with a custom site design project, you’ll get help from not only web developers but also SEO specialists. The latter implements best practices that’ll help your site rank better on search engines. Some ways in which they give custom sites a boost over time include:
- Crafting metadata, page URLs, alt tags for images, and site content that incorporates relevant keywords
- Working with the development team to implement a site architecture that is user- and mobile-friendly
- Helping identify what pages should be “crawled” by search engines or not
- Inserting internal links that enhance the user experience
4. Ability to Evolve in Response to Business Changes
Custom website design gives businesses the freedom to scale the development process. Although developers will initially set up a proper architecture while creating the roadmap of the site, you may need to add additional functionality or content in response to business changes. Thanks to your established relationship with a web design agency, you’ll be spared the headache of trying to do this on your own and potentially fouling up your site. That said, it’ll likely entail additional costs so be prepared for that. Template websites, on the other hand, are developed to remain static or worse, aren’t updated properly or maintained to meet change web needs.
5. Flexibility with Hosting
Lastly, deciding to go with a customized website offers you greater control over your website’s hosting, especially if you wish to change up your provider or have business-specific requirements. Drag-and-drop website builders, unfortunately, don’t offer this flexibility. Benefits that come with the freedom to choose a hosting company might include:
- Ability to scale beyond a “shared” hosting environment
- Automated file and data backups and customized backup locations
- Direct server performance and uptime monitoring
- Optimized setup and configuration for your selected CMS
- Easy to create and deploy staging environments
- Integration with other tools and technologies that might otherwise be restricted