Which One to Pick: Template or Custom Web Design
So, you have landed on this blog post and I’m assuming that you’re curious to work on the website development. Regardless, the fact it could be for your own or might be for your client.
While going into the process, we are all stuck on the roller coaster ride of thinking that how we do it. After having a great discussion we come to a discussion that there are mainly two ways to make it happen. One is to pick a template, set everything up and launch it.
The second process is time taking, challenging but full of learning challenges and it is custom website design. So, if you’re also one of them who is confused about hiring a custom website design company or purchasing a template that makes things done. Then, this entire blog post is for you. Because I’m going to talk about what is the difference between them and in the end, you will be able to have a wiser choice.
What Are Website Templates And How Do They Work?
Website templates are pre-designed layouts that help you with organizing the content into a webpage. A ready-made template comes up with different functionalities like you can do the drag & drop widgets for example changing the position of images, content, and logo.
You can find out thousands of website template vendors over the internet. What they do is create website design templates for different niches and also allow you to have a quick demo. It makes it easy for users to decide and choose the desired template.
What Are Custom Web Designs And How Do They Work?
Custom designs for websites are built on different stacks that could start from HTML/CSS, Javascript, and Bootstrap initially. Then, things could get more to an advanced level with jQuery and JS libraries including ReactJS, etc.
The process of having the custom website design leads you to write the code from scratch with a great number of experiences. Otherwise, you need to hire a freelancer or an agency.
Let’s Discuss: Working with a Template
Working with a template is a good option, you have peace of mind and everything looks too simple. If I name some of the popular website builders or the companies that allow you to purchase templates including Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy and the list goes on. you ask me personally I love WordPress and have been recommended to a bunch of customers across the globe.
If we start looking at the other perspective of choosing the template for your website. So, the first thing is you don’t need to be tech-savvy in order to work around the templates. You can also save on the money because you don’t have to invest much in customizing and development and that budget can be utilized for later use like marketing and SEO.
On the other hand, there are some negative points as well. Not all template providers offer constant support. If you just get support then it would be a nightmare because your something that brings the major of your business. And, you don’t want your user to do something about getting an error when they visit your website.
Advantages of Choosing Templates
- Easy & faster to market
- Doesn’t require much budget
- Allow various integration with third-party tools
- You can have a bunch of choices around specific niches
- Doesn’t require coding knowledge
- A single resource can manage the template for the website
Disadvantages of Choosing Templates
- You can’t be assured of having the constant support
- You might face issues with responsiveness for other devices
- Not easy to incorporate a proper SEO system
- You can be limited in the design
Working with a Custom Website Design
You might feel me biased here because I love using custom website design rather than picking a template and making it live. Big giants are born to embrace challenges that’s the reason they always work on custom website design. The second reason is that they have a long-term plan. You know, the fact is custom websites are more effective in order to generating more business.
Suppose, you have a company that doesn’t have the much websites to route the traffic. So, you can easily go with the custom website design and it looks more appealing. As per my personal experience, the audience stays and explores the custom websites. Please do check out these cool websites.
Check out Buffer and look at how they explain their services.
Check out Agoraoulse and don’t forget to pay attention to their second fold.
The best of working with a custom design is that you have the authority to build a great system for SEO. Integrate the Google tools like tag manager, and analytics and have a strong tracking of your website performances.
If you’re thinking that there are no disadvantages of custom design websites. TBH, there are a few, first, you need to have good patience because good thing takes time. Here you need to follow the rigid process first you need to think about the design or mockups, then, work on selecting the technologies and writing code for it. On top of that, you also need to add a lot of functionalities to make it dope.
Another one is the cost! It’s better to build your own team along with the quality assurance so that they can have details of all the functionality.
Alright, let’s also quickly discuss what technology or stack we should use for frontend designing or that would help you to build an attractive custom website.
So the first is your team must have a great hands-on with HTML/CSS because these two stacks are the backbone. If I talk about the advanced layer that could help you to support the more visualization of the websites.
For gamification, you need to work with the frameworks like Angular that support the MVC architecture, code generation, code splitting, etc. In order to start with Angular, you must have basic knowledge of architecture, work with DOM, data binding, routing, and components, to more advanced topics such as directives and pipes.
Second, you can go with ReactJS or Meteor JS which is written in Node.js and makes it possible for you to create real-time web applications for different platforms.
Advantages with Custom Design
- You have the authority, to customize and play around whenever you want
- Search engine optimization is easier and more convenient to setup
- Browser compatibility and responsiveness of the website will be in your hand
- You don’t need support
Disadvantages of Custom Design
- Takes time
- Requires team management and have to define workflow
- Need efforts and have to update versions of the different technology stack
It’s time for Verdict!
Well, now it’s time to make a decision on which strategy you want to with. Either it’s a template or a custom web design. I know it’s a stressful decision, however, if you know which questions to ask then the reverse engineering and making a decision on it would become really easy for you. In my opinion, if you don’t have any limitations on the budget then you should opt for custom web designs because it will pay you in a long run.
For now, that’s it from my side, please do share what process you’re using to develop your website, and why is that? Cheers!
Add Comment