In this day and age, if you want to have a successful business, it’s a given that you need to have a successful website. With all of the expenses involved in running a business, the temptation is strong towards taking the easy way out and using a quick to develop template to create your site. It may be cheaper, but there are a whole slew of reasons why using a template site design is a terrible idea and can negatively affect your business. Here are a few of the major advantages a custom designed site has.

1. Originality – If you decide to use a template, in all likelihood, there are several other sites somewhere online using the exact same one. A custom designed site means that your site will be different from every other site on the web. Your site will have its own identity and will be memorable for it. The same can’t be said if 3,000 other people are using a similar design to what you are using.
2. Features – Templates really limit you in what your website is capable of. With custom design, if you dream it, it can be done. What good is thinking big, when the design and feature set of your site is limited to a few default settings or extensions that were developed by someone who didn’t quite have your business in mind? It’s not good at all. Come up with a wish list of what you wish your site could do and do a search on how easy it is to pull them all off from one template site. You’ll find that custom coding will need to come into play eventually anyway if you want to reach your goals. You might as well have the experts do it.
3. Ease of updating content – A template site will usually have just one or two ways of doing things, and they will usually be in a very generic way to try to meet the needs of as many people as possible. The problem this poses for businesses, is that your needs are probably much more specific. Having a custom designed site with its own custom built content management system means that everything can be designed streamlined, with ease of use in mind, because the designer will be able to have a clear idea about how the site will be used, as opposed to designing for how many hundreds of thousands of situations a template site could be used. Custom content management systems will mean that you can log into the back end of your site, make an update, and it will be so automated to your needs, that you won’t have to think about it twice. It will just work.
4. Organic SEO – When you use a template site, you lose out on a chance to build your site from the ground up with your target audience in mind. There are a lot of places in the background coding of a site where you can impact how likely your site is to rank highly on Google. An expert custom website designer will know how to organically optimize your site for the keywords you want to be found for, without keyword stuffing, which can negatively affect your ranking. If the first goal of you building a website, is for it to be found, than why start with a large disadvantage?
5. Support – Last but not least, if you are developing your site using a template, you are most likely going to be left to your own devices. There are many potential frustrations that can arise when developing a site on your own. Even if you have one of the skill sets you need to develop a site, you most likely don’t have all of them. Most custom web design teams will have all their bases covered, including coding experts, graphic designers, copywriters, SEO experts, and marketing experts which will be able to back you up and make sure that your site is in ship shape from top to bottom, inside and out.

So if you know that your business is in need of a website, make sure that you know what you’re getting yourself into before you decide to go the template route. If you’re going to do it at all, you might as well do it right. Check back next week to learn how social media can be used to improve your business.