Posted on September 29, 2022 / by Webmaster / in IT knowledge base

Custom Website Design and Development

We’ve explained how to make the best use of your WordPress website to promote your business and improve its operational efficiencies. There is no doubt WordPress is one of the most popular tools for non-techies to make websites. And the end products are not just any websites, but functional and glowingly beautiful. Besides WordPress the market is flooded with similar solutions. Customers have a lot of options. Literally all of them come pre-packaged for ease-of-use so that people can build a website without any coding knowledge. For amateur graphics designers, there is an ample selection of ready-made templates to choose from. So that might make you wonder why in such a world would somebody still need custom website design and development.

What is a custom website?

Simply speaking a custom website is one that is designed and built from scratch. It doesn’t use any off-the-shelf pre-designed theme or template. It is made to order for a particular client, brand or project. Although template-based websites are robust, affordable and in most cases aesthetically pleasing, yet no one size can fit all. They might not be quite able to fulfill the requirements of built-to-spec projects and some high end clients.

With a custom designed and built website, there are many added benefits:

#1 A true branded website

A branded website is more than merely having some aligning visual elements such as a logo, color, and typography. But instead the first thing a branded website must have is an ingenious projection of your brand’s image. Your brand image is not only a composition of your brand’s value, purpose, promise, voice and personality. It is also a reflection of your level of professionalism, expertise and service quality.

As can be seen the company website is always one of the first impressions prospective customers get of a business. Showing a visible and clear brand image is important cause it will help build and foster a connection between your business and target audience. So here’s the key difference: a true branded website communicates your brand to customers in totality. And when it does, the website will earn more trust, engagement and conversion.

#2 Tailor-made features and functionalities

Each business or organization would have a different vision and goals to achieve with their website. Some might just need a simple website that provides general information about their company, while others might be looking into a fast growing website with the capability to take orders, confirm booking, connect to the supply chain or even provide crypto services.

If you just need a basic website, a template based solution is the natural choice. However, if you foresee you’ll need to handle tens of thousands of transactions each day or yours is a fast developing business, a custom website will guarantee you the maximum flexibility for expansion and adaptability.

With a custom web development, literally you can include any unique and useful features you can think of. This applies to both the frontend and backend systems.

Frontend customizations

On the frontend side, it could be anything from a more engaging onboarding process, self-checkin, survey form or AI-powered product recommendation. Given that a website could also be an information hub than purely a standalone site, as much as it needs to serve your customers, it also needs to serve your staff.

Backend customizations

In regardless how big your company is, having a streamlined operation means you can do more, eliminate unnecessary errors and at the same time, reduce workload, free up time among other valuable resources. A custom website gives you an open platform on which your back office operation can be built upon.

One obvious advantage is your backend operation and the customer-facing website are tightly integrated. Your sales and service team can respond to customer calls more swiftly. There is much less restriction too. Your can design your own UI, workflow and connect your system to other internal or external systems. For example, you might want to incorporate and use Instant Messaging (IM) in your call center. That your staff can do a more direct conversation with customers. Or if you are a heavy weight player in eCommerce, you need your system to ‘talk’ to your warehouse and delivery agent proactively for shipping arrangements. When the order is ready to ship, the system will send a notification to the customer without any manual intervention.

All things considered a custom website is a game-changer for businesses as it can automate workflows and provide your team with a more seamless communications and data integration.

#3 Inexhaustible scalability and performance

When it comes to modern websites, it is not just functions and features matter. Both scalability and performance are essential.

In today’s 5G world, customers have no patience nor empathy for a poorly-performed website. No one will be waiting around for a web page to load, a form or a payment to process. If your website cannot handle requests in a timely manner when users and workloads increase, inevitably you will loose customers as they will just leave for somewhere else offering them a better user experience.

As opposed to a template based website, it might contain some unnecessary features that are useless to your business, custom websites are built with scalability in mind. Fundamentally they are more light-weighted. And in general they have a longer lifespan. Custom web developments are more adaptable to changing needs and preferences. It is less probable that you need to carry out extensive upgrades or even replace your system when your business grows and expands.

#4 Top-class customer journey and unique design

A great CX (customer experience) is a guarantee that happy clients will keep coming back.

With custom web developments, you will have the rooms you need to devise a more enjoyable and frictionless customer journey. A good customer journey will ensure your website is easy to navigate. And that the website is providing a seamless interaction no matter what the customers need to achieve.

The other benefit you have is you can create a unique and appealing design more freely. We do not do this for the sake of fun. The goal is to better meet customer needs. When we put together these extra considerations and works, they will make your brand identity stronger, and eventually lead to increased brand value and sales growth.

Customizable versus Custom Websites

Some clients are confused and led to believe customizable websites and custom websites are the same. In fact they are not.

Entirely based on the client’s requirements or specifications, custom websites are designed and built from the ground up. No template is used. Basically the project is started with a blank canvas. From navigational structure, graphics, to the selection of colors and fonts, every element has to be pieced together by a web designer. In some extreme cases, icons, background images or even fonts are made exclusively for the project.

On the contrary, customizable websites are websites built with a template that allows you to implement certain changes. How complex you can change is varied in each theme though.

Notably many WordPress themes came standard with options for the site administrator to customize their website’s appearance in such layouts as full page, boxed, 2-column, 3-column, color, font, with or without sidebar, etc. To make these changes, you don’t need any coding skill at all, but a little bit of WordPress knowledge. Yet somehow these options are rather limited. To go beyond these basic settings or personalizations, in most cases it is doable. But then this is not for beginners. You may probably need to know more about HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript.

Custom-made WordPress website

As you might have noticed, what we meant was the front-end website and its UI/ UX design when we talked about custom websites above. Actually the clients still have the options to choose between building the backend system from scratch or using WordPress’s CMS (Content Management System) for their custom web project.

Along with a lower cost and shorter time, we can take advantage of the familiarity of WordPress’s CMS if we choose to take the WordPress’s route. In this regard we have emphasized repetitively that WordPress is easy to use and SEO-ready. It might not be designed for very demanding systems. But definitely it is a good choice for small- to medium-size websites.

4 levels of website customizations

Before we finish, we have summarized here below the 4 levels of website customizations, from easy to complex:

Level 1: Not much is changed with the chosen template. All you do is perhaps adding your own contents and adjusting the webpage layouts to fit them in. Or at best you also tweak the website’s appearance by changing some configurable parameters or make some modifications to the CSS properties.

Level 2: The frontend and/ or the backend are (heavily) modified based on a WordPress template.

Level 3: The frontend is 100% tailor-made, no theme is used. While the website runs on WordPress’s CMS.

Level 4: Both the frontend and backend are tailor-made.

But then again there is only the most suitable, but not the best approach. There is not a definitive answer which way to take. How we are going to do it finally is subject to the budget, the project goal, the business plan, and the features and complexity of the website.

Consult a website expert

If you can’t decide what to do with your website project, or you’re puzzling whether or not you should upgrade your website and move beyond a pre-designed theme, please come talk to us. Our team of web consultants and designers can help your business achieve the maximum ROI by advising an effective web design strategy.

By the way, still many clients in Hong Kong are not aware of, website projects are eligible for TVP (Technology Voucher Program) application.

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