If you’re looking to build a new website for your business, you have two options. You can use a website template or build a custom website. There are many reasons why custom websites perform better than template websites. Ultimately, all of these reasons come down to one major theme – custom web design provides you with a much more effective tool to grow your business.
Your website provides the foundation for all your marketing efforts and as a result, it is one of the most important components to a successful marketing strategy. Investing the money in a well-designed custom website will pay huge dividends for your business, allowing you to grow and thrive in ways that simply aren’t possible when you’re constrained by the limitations associated with a template website.
If you’re still on the fence about which approach to take with your new website, consider the following ways in which custom web design can help you grow your business.
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More Effectively Conveys Your Brand Identity
Establishing a strong brand identity is crucial to the success of your business. It helps you stand out from your competitors, conveys your company’s core values, and establishes positive associations with your company among your audience.
According to data reported in Forbes, a strong brand identity will have a significant impact on the success of your business:
- Signature colors improve brand recognition by 80%
- Consistent brand presentation across all modes of communication increases revenue by up to 23%
- 64% of customers state that shared values allow them to form a trusted relationship with a brand
As the foundational component of your marketing strategy, it’s critical that your website convey your brand identity to your audience. When you use a website template, you’re severely limited in your ability to customize the elements of your website. This results in a more generic appearance that isn’t as effective at conveying the key elements of your brand identity.
Custom web design allows you to tailor your website to reflect these key elements of your brand identity. You’ll be able to use the exact brand colors, fonts, imagery and iconography you’ve established, ensuring a more consistent presentation of your brand identity that mirrors the presentation delivered on other platforms. This can help you build connections with your audience that will drive leads and improve conversion rates.
Improves Lead Generation
Simply having a website isn’t enough to engage your audience. You must also deliver an excellent user experience or people will leave your website to find what they’re looking for somewhere else.
The same Forbes study referenced above found that a poor user experience will result in the loss of a significant amount of web traffic:
- 38% of website visitors will leave if your layout is unattractive
- 39% of visitors will leave if images don’t load properly
- 39% of visitors will leave if the website takes too long to load
Custom web design helps you avoid these issues by allowing you to build your website with the needs of your audience in mind:
- You can craft the information architecture and navigation outline in a way that will be easy for your audience to navigate
- You can eliminate the bloated code that causes websites to load slowly
- You can ensure that a mobile-friendly responsive design is used so that your website functions properly on all devices (desktop, tablet, mobile)
- You can create the specific forms and Calls To Action that will most effectively resonate with your audience, increasing the likelihood that they will perform your desired action
- You can optimize your website for your specific customer journey to more effectively lead them through the marketing funnel
Ultimately, this enhanced user experience will drive more leads. The limitations associated with template websites make it much more challenging to create the user experience necessary to optimize lead generation.
Increases Website Traffic
You can have a beautiful website that effectively conveys your brand and delivers the information your audience is seeking, but it won’t help your business if no one can find your website. Google’s search algorithms become increasingly complex with each passing year, making it harder than ever to rank on the first page. Without a strong SEO strategy, your website will have a great deal of trouble ranking well.
Template websites often aren’t built with SEO best practices in mind:
- They often contain bloated, outdated code which can negatively impact your website’s functionality
- They often lack updated security measures which are important for ranking well on the search engines
- They often don’t allow you to implement a mobile-friendly responsive design, limiting your website’s ability to provide an optimal user experience on all devices
When you work with a custom web design agency, your website will be built with SEO best practices in mind:
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our navigation outline will be constructed based on extensive keyword research, ensuring it includes all the specific pages necessary to rank for your target keywords - On-page optimization will be performed on all pages prior to the launch of your website, ensuring they contain all the SEO elements necessary to rank well
- A plan for building a solid backlink profile will be put in place to help establish your website as an authoritative source, which is an essential component to improving SEO rankings
- Your website will be built using the most up-to-date and streamlined code, improving your site speed and load time, which are both critical ranking factors
- Your website will contain the proper security features necessary to improve rankings
- A comprehensive content strategy will be implemented to ensure your website continues to add the content necessary to support your target keywords over time
- Responsive design will be implemented to ensure your website provides the best user experience on all devices
our navigation outline will be constructed based on extensive keyword research, ensuring it includes all the specific pages necessary to rank for your target keywordsInvesting in a custom website built according to SEO best practices will help improve your search rankings, making your website more visible to your target audience. This will help you generate more traffic and improve leads.
Greater Scalability Over Time
Your business isn’t a static entity. It will grow and evolve over time. Therefore, you may find that the needs of your business – and your customers – change as this evolution occurs. It’s critical to have a website that is scalable and flexible in order to address these changing needs as they arise.
Template websites are extremely limited in their ability to provide this flexibility as you grow. You’re essentially constrained by the parameters of the template. Because custom web design gives you a blank slate, you’re able to build this scalability and flexibility into the design process. You’ll have a greater ability to alter the navigation structure to address the needs of a new target audience, incorporate an ecommerce platform if you decide you’d like to start selling your products directly on your website, or implement just about any change necessary to ensure your website continues to meet the needs of your business as it grows.
Improved Ability to Make Your Business Stand Out from Your Competitors
When you use a website template, you’re constrained by the themes available to you. These themes are also being used by thousands of other companies – both in your industry and in other industries – and as a result, your website is much more likely to look generic and have a similar feel as many of the other websites your audience comes across. This will make it challenging for your business to stand out from your competitors.
Custom web design allows you to create a totally unique website that accentuates the strengths of your business, reinforces your brand, and appeals to the unique preferences of your target audience. This allows you to more easily stand out from your competitors and convey your messaging in a way that differentiates your business as an industry leader.
Webolutions Can Help Your Business Grow
Most businesses lack the resources to employ a team of in-house web designers. Without a team of internal experts, you’ll need to work with an experienced web design and development agency in order to create the custom website necessary to help your business continue to grow and thrive over time. At Webolutions, we’re here to help.
As Denver’s leading web design company since 1994, Webolutions has the experience necessary to deliver the results you need. Our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach has been designed to grow your business faster, smarter and easier.
As part of this unique approach, we’ll engage your company on a collaborative journey that identifies what is special and unique about your business. We’ll also conduct extensive market research to clearly understand what your competitors are saying and doing. This discovery session, along with our market research, will help us establish your industry leading market positioning and differentiate you from your competitors. We’ll then work with your team to develop your key brand communications elements, which will be conveyed on your website and throughout your marketing strategy.
This process will drive the planning of your new custom website. You’ll benefit from our exclusive Websites Right Methodology™ which has been developed over the past 28 years, incorporating the knowledge and lessons learned from building thousands of custom websites for businesses in a wide range of industries. Our unique, fully integrated, strategic approach to website development creates a better client experience, delivers increased website marketing performance and achieves superior results for your business.
Contact us today to schedule a free custom website development consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.
