When it comes to digital marketing, you might have come across the term ‘custom projects’ or ‘custom web projects.’ These terms are often coming across especially if a company, business, or brands need a new website for their digital marketing needs.
The reason a website is created can vary significantly. There are quite a number of factors to consider and several choices to make when considering building a new website for your business, but among the most critical of those decisions is whether to base your website on Framer templates or go with a completely custom design from scratch.
Every new business begins with a unique brand name. Before delving into website design, it’s essential to have a distinctive brand name. In our digital era, tools like a business name generator can simplify this task, ensuring your brand starts on the right foot.
The Digital Marketing Dilemma
This dilemma is an important one, especially since there is no clear ‘better’ choice, and that both have their own nuanced benefits and drawbacks. Digital marketing is a constant assessment of benefits vs drawbacks itself, so consolidating web templates against custom web designs can be a great way to not just gain a better understanding of them but also help you make a decision either way.
Before we do that, however, we need to make it clear what a web template and a custom web design is in the first place.
The Web Template – A Pre-Made Digital Marketing Tool
A website template, or templates, are essentially pre-made layouts of a website, with everything put together enough to make it a working website.
Website templates have all the tools and props you need for your website to look both simple and well-designed.
Most of the work that the use of a web template requires is just dragging and dropping the things you need in place and calling it a day.
Almost everything, from an image, to logos, text, and more, can be added, moved, or changed somewhat.
However, the overall design and theme remains the same. It can be more work on an already pre-made web template to change it too much rather than build it from scratch.
Think of a web template as a pre-made building. To change something, you will need to demolish it, and demolishing parts of it can be especially tricky, to almost being not worth it at all.
Most people pose the question as to why they need a professional when they can just make the website design themselves. Of course, a web template has its uses, but the true potential of a website and digital marketing can only be truly unleashed with the aforementioned custom projects.
Custom Web Designs – A Digital Marketing Powerhouse
A custom web design is when the website creation—from its development to its graphics—are all custom made by professional artists, developers, designers, and programmers. At times, a custom project has multiple teams working on it, and has significantly more complexity to it compared to the drag-and-drop design of a web template.
Despite seeming like an expensive and arduous process—which it is—custom web designs can initially seem as unnecessary for a simple website.
However, we tend to not consider that in digital marketing, websites are anything but simple.
Everything needs to work perfectly for a website to be truly effective. A custom web design ensures that all your digital marketing endeavors are specifically tailored to your business, and can let your website truly stand out from the crowd.
Choosing Between A Template or Custom Design
Both these sides of digital marketing have their own uses, and in some cases, one can be better than the other. Still, it is important to know why, and the things that make one better are not necessarily the ones that make the other one worse. It is important to consider these two things as being very different from each other, serving different uses.
The Web Template Advantages
Time:
Due to the fact that everything is already pre-made, it should come as no surprise that the unparalleled advantage that web template designs have over custom projects is that they have a fast turnaround time.
A web template project is as simple as picking a template, adjusting a few things here and there, making some tweaks, and you are done.
Of course, there is more to it than that, but those are the basics of it. After all, that is what a template is designed to be; a ready-to-go usable item.
Skill Ceiling:
As web templates are relatively simple, they also need next to no skill to be used in an effective web design. Of course, some basic level HTML and CSS knowledge and know how comes in handy, but it is not strictly necessary.
The Web Template Disadvantages
Homogeneity in Design:
As web templates are often available online to everyone, they are bound to be used by multiple people across industry sectors. This, of course, is something that no digital marketing professional would recommend, as having similar designs make your brand or your website less appealing to customers as a whole.
Moreover, by using similar designs, it can look unprofessional and a ‘lazy’ method of just copying someone else’s design, even if both designs were templates.
Poor SEO Ranking:
Web templates are designed to be ready-to-use. They are not designed with website or search engine ranking in mind, which is a critical aspect of digital marketing today. This could also mean that the template does not work well across all web browsers and devices, adding to the issues.
Limited Customizability:
Most of the time, the website templates are provided as-is, with very little customization possible. This can make creating certain websites difficult that require that advanced-level tweaking.
The Custom Web Design Advantages
Uniqueness:
One of the most significant advantages that a custom web project provides you is standing out from the rest. Of course, if your competition has custom web designs themselves, they will stand out as well, but the added quality of a custom project simply makes it better in its distinction.
Standing out from one’s competition is one of the key drivers of successful digital marketing, and it is no different for these kinds of projects. Using a web designer, like this Web Design Penrith specialist, gives businesses an edge over their market rivals, and in the current digital space where there seem to be hundreds if not thousands of websites doing the same thing, uniqueness can play a huge role in driving success.
SEO-friendliness:
Of course, with the custom website design comes the fact that it can be designed for SEO and website ranking as well. Certain aspects of a website can determine if it is better for SEO or not. www.seobility.net, for example, provides websites with an SEO score as well as everything that makes it SEO friendly or serves as a detriment to it.
It goes without saying that the better SEO a website has, the better ranking it will get on search engines. Every aspect of the web design, from the content to the development itself, serves towards increasing or decreasing SEO.
Scalability and Custom Integration:
Chances are that your business is not just providing one product, or at least, you aren’t planning to. If so, the custom web design offers significant digital marketing benefits, chief among them being the Content Management System (CMS).
The CMS is an invaluable tool for businesses to manage the website, all while utilizing the full custom web design potential of incorporating custom plugins and other aspects into it.
Custom Web Design Disadvantages
Cost:
One of the major drawbacks of the custom web design is that it is an expensive endeavor. While you only may have to buy a website template, chances are that you have to either hire and in-house team capable of custom projects, or outsource it to professionals that can handle it.
Regardless of the path you choose, it comes at a significant cost. Of course, hiring an entire team or teams for a single project is never recommended, but it can pay off if you plan on dealing with multiple projects for your Multinational Enterprise (MNE).
Turnaround Time:
Custom web design projects can take a long time. The complexity and large number of personnel involved means that it could take around 3-4 months depending on the complexity of the work, but that ball park is an average.
From the discovery period to the final modification and testing period, it can take around 14 weeks if everything goes smoothly. Delays are also a common aspect of custom projects, so it can take significantly longer as well. While no digital marketing endeavor is quick and easy, this can be especially daunting if the market you are targeting changes constantly.
Conclusion
When it comes to digital marketing, a template or custom website is often one of the most important decisions, especially if both are viable for your business. Here, we present a look for what to choose by showing you the pros and cons of both the web templates and custom web design in digital marketing.
