In your industry you’re great at what you do. And chances are you want the world to know this too. That’s why many businesses employ a marketing agency to help spread the word about the services they provide and products they have to offer.
Whether it’s through a well optimised website, effective presence on social media, or some great publicity, these are the experts who should be able to use such tools to help bring customers your way and keep them coming back for more.
However, if digital marketing feels alien to you and you’d rather concentrate on what you do best, it might be easy to be baffled by all the jargon and tempting to just go along with whatever sounds like the best deal.
Before you become seduced by a great looking website, it pays to know the differences in the type of website you’re going for. For example, some maybe based around a theme that has already been created and used before, which would make it cheaper to use, but have limitations because it wasn’t originally made for you.
While, if you want something bespoke and unique, although it may be more expensive, you know it’s been configured solely for your needs and will be more appealing to the search engines.
Both kinds of websites have their pluses and minuses, depending on what you need them for, but they just differ greatly in cost, because of the time needed to build them. So before you go for a website design, take a look at this list created by our web development team which outlines the pros and cons of each.
Custom-made website
Pros:
- It will be entirely your own, there won’t be anything like that done before and this will set you apart from the competition.
- Our builds are made to suit the client’s exact requests and their future ambitions, therefore there are less likely to be limitations and setbacks.
- Less reliant on plugins and other third parties which might break in future updates.
- Comes with custom fields and sections setup to make adding data seamless and easy to maintain.
- Optimised for speed.
- If coded well, other developers can take over the website, so if the client moves elsewhere they don’t need to build another website.
- Future updates should be easy to develop and scale.
- Coded to latest best principles, keeping devices, accessibility and user experience in mind.
- Coded for search engine optimisation.
Cons:
- It typically costs more to develop initially, however, in the long-term, further developments should not take as long to complete with a purpose built website.
Theme
Pros:
- Effectively skipping the design phase of the build, as the theme already has a design.
- Cheaper in the short-term.
- Third party plugins provide an easy to use drag and drop facility.
- You could potentially maintain and build a website without a developer unless specific functionality and design is required.
Cons:
- Not all theme developers follow best coding practices, which can mean problems down the line.
- If there is a bug with the theme, it’s up to the theme author to fix them or to have an agency patch the fix.
- You are limited to what you can and can’t do with a pre-made theme, including appearance and functionality.
- If you need to customise the theme, your options are limited.
- Theme updates may break customisations made.
- Typically one-size fits all, which means lots and lots of functionality you will never use.
- It’s not bulletproof, you’ll commonly find conflicts where certain settings cause bugs with no solution.
- Encourages bad practices with adding styling into third party apps rather than in organised stylesheets.
- Typically themes don’t always supply logical means of updating content so you have to repeat the process rather than storing it in one place.
- Themes become overly bloated from the start and the website can be very slow and heavy.
Ultimately, before you make a decision on the type of website you go for, your marketing agency should make you aware of exactly what it is you are getting for your money. This might help explain why some quotes differ so greatly so do make sure you ask them.
If you would like to find out more about the sort of web development that would most benefit you, then get in touch with our expert team today.
