It seems impossible for any business to function in the present day without having an internet presence of some kind. Additionally, even while many businesses have recognized the potential of social media and used it as a marketing platform to introduce their brands to the public, doing so is no longer sufficient to differentiate you from the competition. This is due to the fact that practically all businesses nowadays, no matter how tiny, have a social presence.
Internet sites The very minimum you require to truly differentiate yourself from the competition is a Custom Website that features information about your business and informs potential clients of who you are and what you do.
There are three primary methods for developing a company website:
Platforms for building websites (Wix, SITE123, 1&1, etc)
Managed by open-source software (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc)
Professionally created, one-of-a-kind websites that are suited to your business's demands
Each of them has pros and cons, but today I want to talk about the top five advantages of choosing Custom Web Design And Development Services.
1. Individuality
Unless, of course, you pay to have a custom theme produced, though this may be pricey, you're often given a ready-made theme to work with when utilizing a website builder or CMS software. This theme enables you to insert certain components into pages in predefined styles, which may provide the appearance of originality when you're actually constrained by the theme's restrictions. Therefore, even if you're developing something from scratch with your own unique vision, it will unavoidably resemble the hundreds or even thousands of other websites that use the same theme.
There is no theme for a website that is bespoke. Your website's architecture is created according to your specifications and is unrestricted in terms of how it can appear. This implies that no two websites will ever have an identical appearance.
By entering the Custom Web Design And Development of the narrative that your consumers are most likely to follow, you can create your site around the customer journey and stand out from the competition.
2. Speed
Many website builders and CMSs provide a ton of built-in features. This is done to accommodate as many various types of users as possible, enabling these platforms and systems to reach the broadest audience feasible. The issue is that every website built on these platforms includes all of this capability, whether or not it is necessary.
Bloatware, as it is frequently referred to, can damage the technical architecture of the site, which can impact how long it takes for the website to load. It can also make things more complicated for users.
A customer's decision to buy from you or not can sometimes come down to how quickly your website loads, especially now that so many people access the internet via mobile devices and mobile broadband. Over 50% of website visitors are abandoned if a page takes longer than three seconds to load, according to a white paper published by Google through the DoubleClick platform on how speed impacts publisher profits.
You may fully prevent bloatware and unwanted features by developing your website from scratch. Building each of the features for your site helps you to optimize both the functionality and the website design for these functions, further lowering load times, in addition to eliminating needless functionality.
3. Safety
On the internet, website security has long been a hot subject. The security of the internet and websites has, however, been a top priority for both search engines and users due to significant security breaches in recent years. It has come to the point where Google has configured Chrome to immediately alert users when they submit any data on a form that is hosted on a page without SSL enabled.
Google has been advocating for an SSL-encrypted web since before this year, hinting that they may include SSL as part of their ranking system in the future. But because this never really took off, the danger has been placed fully on the shoulders of websites that accept any type of data through non-SSL pages rather than penalizing website owners for not using SSL.
Whether it's an open-source CMS or a website builder, using an existing platform to create your website exposes it to security flaws that also impact all other websites built on that platform. This implies that any website utilizing that platform, including all others, might be compromised using a vulnerability discovered on one of those websites.
By following two easy steps, using a Custom Web Design And Development business substantially reduces these risks.
They should constantly keep SSL in mind when developing. Because SSL should be used throughout the entire site, there will be fewer problems in the future.
They'll have proprietary source code. They could employ open-source programming languages (such as PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.), but the public won't have access to their code. As continual penetration testing, which may be a resource- and time-intensive, is the only method to identify vulnerabilities in a custom-built site, this instantly lowers the likelihood of a breach.
Another crucial issue is that many businesses who create Custom websites also host them for the client (like we do), thus the hosting environment is frequently optimized for the security of the hosted websites and apps.
4. Flexibility And Scalability
A crucial component of getting your business online is having a website that can expand quickly as your organization expands. Therefore, for any organization aiming to grow in the digital world, it is essential to have your digital presence developed with a system that is both scalable to handle bigger volumes of traffic and adaptable so that it is simple to add new capabilities to the existing platform.
Because website builders are neither flexible nor scalable, their usefulness for any significant business is highly constrained. The company owner will be forced to convert to either a CMS or a Custom Web Design And Development once the lifespan of a website created using a website builder is up.
Open-source CMSs do offer far greater scalability and flexibility, but they also have a higher cost and typically need to be managed by a firm or expert. (When DQ Media first started, we decided to use WordPress for all of our projects. However, we soon discovered that doing so was far more expensive due to the constraints and resources needed to scale WordPress projects and modify them to suit our needs.)
You may design your website with scalability in mind if you construct it from scratch. Additionally, a project that is designed from the bottom up is more adaptable to change since you do not need to work with superfluous functionality to upgrade your site. This is because it has less dependent functionality built in.
5. Functionality That's Tailored To Your Company
It shouldn't only be about branding and marketing while creating a Custom Website. The opportunity to customize your website for your company is one of the greatest and most crucial reasons to do so. Although open-source CMSs provide you with a lot of flexibility, it may sometimes be difficult and expensive to get the functionality to run in a way that benefits your organization.
Enhanced Customer Experience
You may create what you need right away rather than having to go through countless functional and design possibilities. You may create a customer journey that is more suited to your organization and clients in addition to creating functionalities that will aid your business processes.
The path from visitor to the customer may be made more efficient by customizing your website's customer journey. By doing this, the number of visitor drop-offs is reduced and the number of visitors who become customers rises.
Automation of Business Functions
Using a Custom Website, you may optimize many of your business processes in addition to streamlining your consumer experience. The amount of time you spend organizing your customer data can be significantly reduced and business efficiency increased by doing something as simple as capturing potential leads into a specific table in your website administration area and exporting them to an Excel file using a structure that is optimized for your sales team.
Integrating XML feeds into your website allows you to truly develop the functionality your business requires, whether you want to immediately update your internal POS and stock-keeping software or add clients from your website into your CRM system.
Although I've already mentioned the drawbacks of website builders and open-source CMS platforms, each also has advantages.
The simplest and least expensive option for every company owner is to use a website builder; the major expense is time as a technical expert is not required to work on the site. On the other side, open-source CMSs provide you with a lot more freedom and capability than website builders, but you'll need technical assistance to use them. Additionally, CMSs require continuous upgrading, so you must continuously manage the website to keep it safe.
In light of these considerations, it's crucial to keep in mind that a Custom Website typically costs more upfront than other available solutions. In the long run, having a website that is specifically tailored to your company's needs and those of your customers can not only be more cost-effective than using open-source software, but it can also help increase sales because customers will take the route you have planned for them rather than one that is preprogrammed in an existing piece of software.