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Custom web design or web design package?

custom web design or web design package

Which one? How do you choose?

The decision to have a custom-built website over a web design package will depend on many factors, one of which is budget. How much do you have to spend? Custom built websites can be expensive. The other consideration is what are the driving factors behind your choice for a custom built website? Is it functionality or aesthetics? Finally, will your website be useful to users and are there business processes that can be integrated into your web design to make it useful to your clients? Your response to theses questions will determin whether a custom built system is qualified.

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Budget

What is your budget? Custom built websites are expensive for a number of reasons. One is the time it takes for the requirements and discovery phase, plus evaluation. Not to mention the specifications, design, build and testing. All of which are iterative, producing different files and documentation, yet intrinsically connected to each other. Many factors can influence the desire for a bespoke website, but before embarking on a decision to have a custom website developed, you or your organisation need to ask yourself two questions, which are:
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Functionality or Aesthetics. Which one is the driving factor?

When  deciding whether to go for a custom-built website, a key factor for choosing a custom-built website should almost always be given to functionality rather than aesthetics for many reasons. One is how beautiful is beautiful? One person’s desire is another person’s guile. You can pour out thousands of pounds to have a website look a certain way and find out that actually what you thought was beautiful in your eyes and the eyes of your team is actually not perceived in the same way by others. I’m not saying you should not have a custom website built just to look a certain way, but what I am saying is if you had to choose over looks or functionality because of costs, choose functionality and if cost is not a factor, great go for both and ask yourself the question.
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What are the requirements needed to make the website useful for your users? What value will they bring? Can these requirements be integrated into the business process online?

Countless scenarios will give an answer to these questions, all of which will depend on project specific requirements, but most will fall into either one of the categories below.

  • Business to Customer Interactions
  • Customer to Business interactions
  • Customer to Customer Interactions
  • API Intergrations
  • External service integrations
  • Ecommerce
  • Security

When to go for custom web design

Custom built websites should almost always be driven by the desire to accommodate functionality that enables one or more of the listed scenarios above to take place for usability and return on investment. And in our opinion should go beyond the looks and feel of a website, but rather try to address or improve functionality by adding automation where possible to improve business processes. Helping your users to interact with your business or organisation in a way that helps improve user experience. Which in turn will give you a higher return on your investment.