Does Your Company Need a Custom Website Design or Will a Template Be Just as Effective?

There are basically two choices all webmasters have when it comes to implementing a design for a new website – get it custom designed or use a template. Each method has its good and bad points. Both can be excellent solutions for your design needs – based on a number of different considerations concerning budget, project timing, specific appearance and functions needs and more.

Custom website designing offers a number of different advantages:

• The design is uniquely yours. No other site will use it because it has been purposely made to your specifications and will not be sold again as a template for use by others.
• Flexibility is inherently built into choosing a custom design approach. The custom approach permits the design to focus on the business instead of the business having to settle for the design.
• It allows constant interaction with the professional designer who, through consultation, can incorporate the design elements you are seeking to create.
• It’s your brand. This is one of the most critical factors when it comes to marketing your business. Presenting your unique brand should remain a major concern when designing your website. Something accomplished more readily designing from scratch.
• Also, designing from scratch allows for the creation of a search engine-friendly site. This approach calls for the hand coding of the site so there is greater search engine optimization experienced.

However, there is more to be done for SEO purposes than merely coding, but implementing code through a custom designing approach will help you obtain higher search engine ranking.

Yes, there are several disadvantages taking the custom designed approach including:

• Higher costs are obviously going to be involved. You do get what you pay for when selecting to create a uniquely yours website.
• Although this approach may take longer development time than using a template, sometimes the latter involves extended design time specifically when attempting to “customize” an “off-the-rack” design with your own personal or business nuances.
• Although many templates are subject to in-depth adjustment, the degree of change may add to development time.

Any business worth the effort to start up and run realizes the need to put a check on spending. This is where using a website template gets very tempting.

There are several advantages using a pre-made template including:

• Templates are inexpensive compared to going the custom route. The can range from as little as “Free,” to obtaining one for possibly even more than a thousand dollars from companies offering to make it unique to you. This means that once you buy it, it will never be sold again.
• You can choose from an extremely wide variety of templates available on the net. There are templates available for a variety of content management systems – Joomla, Drupal, Mambo and more as well as popular blog platforms like WordPress.
• From concept to publishing, your development time can be drastically shorter than going the custom designed route.

Although the advantages are quite appealing, there are disadvantages to consider including:

• Chances are the very same template you choose will be found somewhere on the web. Often, templates are “customized” to make them appear unique, but this can usually only be attempted by users with a modicum more coding knowledge than the average person off the net. However, more often the only thing distinguishing you from others using the same template is the header and other uploaded images. You will not “stand out from the crowd” using a template.
• Use of a template may severely restrict any branding attempts you make through use of a business website. Unless you are prepared to do substantial adjustment to the template coding, it may not fit your specific branding needs.
• Effecting successful SEO efforts may also be extremely limited using a template that has already been pre-coded and not known to be SEO-oriented. You have no idea if the right tags are employed allowing people to find you.

Also, take into consideration another aspect about purchasing either custom design services or a ready-made template online – anonymity. The easy ability to communicate globally has allowed people all across the world to do business with people all across the world. You may never go eye-to-eye with a selected provider when using the Internet for doing business.