So, let’s say you’re starting your own business or a small company, and you’ve decided to get your own website as part of the business plan. In essence, you have two alternatives. The first is to build the website yourself or find someone on your team to do it, using a template. The second is to hire a specialized company or team to design a custom website for you. To make the best possible choice, you’ll have to take into account the budget you are willing to allocate to your website design. But you’ll have to consider not only the short-term, but also the long-term gains of each option. We’ll review the two choices, clarify what template design and custom design actually are, and point out some advantages and disadvantages of each. As you’ll see, a template design may be appealing at first as the cheapest option but could actually end up being more expensive in the long run.

So, let’s say you’re starting your own business or a small company, and you’ve decided to get your own website as part of the business plan. In essence, you have two alternatives. Template Web Development 1.    Visual Website Building Platforms Just as the name indicates, with a template design you’ll be building your website using a template or theme. The most basic option here is to go for a visual platform where you can build your website using mostly drag-and-drop operations. These platforms usually host the website themselves, and the domain name is usually in a predefined format. You can use your own domain name, but for a fee. These visual building platforms offer a quick way of getting your website up and running, but that doesn’t mean they are cheap. In fact, a Wix website, for example, can cost you more per month than a WordPress website if you upgrade to a package that includes, let’s say, your own domain and no ads. Furthermore, these platforms are severely lacking in the versatility department. When you thought of your website as part of your project, you probably had some plans for it beyond showcasing your business. For example, you’d probably like it to rank high in search engines. However, with this type of solution, you won’t be able to do much optimization to make it search engine-friendly. Also, if you’d like to have a more complex website with e-commerce or integrate features that are not supported by the theme you are using, it won’t be easy because you will not be able to touch the code. 2.    Content Management Systems (CMS) As we go up in the “customizable” scale, we go down in the “ease of use” one. Content management systems give you more freedom and even allow you to customize the front-end code for your website, up to a certain degree. WordPress is one of the most used CMS, with Joomla and Drupal also popular choices. Let’s focus on WordPress for the sake of simplicity. With a system like this, there are themes that offer a more “out-of-the-box” approach, while others are more customizable. In any case, you may find that building a WordPress website is not as easy as you initially thought, and end up hiring someone to do the job for you. Again, this applies especially to advanced features like e-commerce, SEO or built-in apps. Upgrading your website’s functionality or changing its design after it is up and running can also be quite troublesome. Content management systems, or even the theme itself, may not be as versatile as it seems. You may have to change the theme and redesign the website. Another aspect relevant to content management systems is that they rely on plugins to perform some functions, based on the user’s requirements. Now, it can happen that a plugin is no longer supported or for some reason is not compatible with some feature of your website. Let’s consider yet another scenario: you needed to change the underlying code for your theme to give your website the functionality you intended. Now, WordPress relies on regular updates for the platform itself, as well as for the plugins and themes. It will be a headache to update the theme now that it has been modified. What happens in each of these last two situations is that either you waste a lot of time solving the problem yourself (and time is money) or you end up hiring a specialist to do it for you, in which case you’ll also spend money. As you are starting to see, what may seem like the quickest and cheapest option early on, may produce complications later down the road, and make you spend a lot more than you initially intended. Custom Web Development With custom web development, you get a completely different experience than with template web development. The idea here is to hire a specialized company to build the website for you. In that case, yes, you will have to set aside a good portion of cash, because good web designers don’t come cheap. But don’t be disheartened just yet. This solution may be cheaper in the end, especially if you have a well-defined long-term plan, for both your company and your website. First of all, the level of customization of your website will be much easier, and the appearance much more unique. The design team will initially try to get to know your company better and find out what the brand is like and what its core values are to then reflect that on the design itself. You will also have access to more advanced backend features such as e-commerce or customer databases, without the integration problems that may arise with template-built websites. Another thing to consider is if you want to expand your business and website in the future, but currently don’t have the budget available. You may choose a more basic website, but designed in such a way that it will be easy to integrate the features you have planned for the future, when your finances allow it. This way, the custom web designer can continue to provide support for your website, but as part of your initial strategy, so you don’t spend more than was initially budgeted. Also, the website may be built in such a way that it’s easy for you to manage or change some content yourself. Furthermore, a website designed through this process will probably be built with SEO in mind from the very beginning. And if you rank higher in search engines it has a chance of making your business grow, giving you a higher return on investment. Wrapping Up As we’ve seen, a custom website design requires an initial investment that can be significantly larger than a template design, in line with your needs. However, this is not the whole story. With a template design, costs can quickly spin out of control once you start having problems managing what appeared to be a simple solution at first. Upgrading your website, updating themes or plugins, changing the design or adding some functionality can be a real nightmare if you’re not a specialist. You’ll end up having to hire a specialist to do the job for you and spend a lot more than you had planned. Therefore, you should always at least consider a custom web design. It is true that it may seem more expensive, but essentially you get what you pay for and have far fewer unpleasant surprises. Unplanned expenses will be greatly reduced. You will also get a fully customized website and provide a unique experience for your viewers. And don’t forget the search engine optimization. A better-ranked website can deliver an increase in customers or bigger revenue for your company. All of this goes to show how you can end up saving money when opting for custom web development.