Do you require a website for your business or you want to have online representation for your offerings? Then there are many ways to build a website and present it to the public. While building a business website, there are many things to consider as well as different choices to make. In any case, the primary consideration to make is whether to go for custom website design or to adopt the smart method of using website templates?
After considering the budget for web design, the primary question you may come across would be, “Why to pay developers and designers when I have the option to get a website template?” So, before making a choice, it is essential to understand both these approaches and learn the pros and cons to make a proper decision based on your requirements.
Pros and cons of custom web design
First, let’s explore the option of custom web design and see its pros and cons.
Advantages of custom web design
One significant advantage of custom web design is the fact that it could make your website unique. Keeping it so will help you to have a competitive edge over the competitors and get benefit out of it. This is crucial in the highly crowded web space. Custom-built sites also tend to be more SEO friendly than built-in templates.
A custom website can not only adapt to your exact business needs, but it will also give you more opportunities to also embed your branding into it. The scalability factor is also high for custom websites than the basic templates. As the business grows, it will give you more room to expand the features too. Along with these, the additional benefits of a good CMS will make it much easier for businesses to keep their websites always updated.
Custom web design disadvantages
Custom web designing may burn a big hole in your pocket compared to using a template. You have to approach a website building professional service or take the assistance of individual designers and developers to get things done. Also, it will take much longer time and effort to develop a custom website design compared to using a template. The custom design is a much complex and time-intensive affair; it is also subjected to many delays and confusion in between.
Pros and cons of website templates
Next, let’s look at the pros and cons of using templates. Using website templates from popular providers like Designmodo website templates could be competent with custom-built websites in terms of aesthetics and features. It can come at a far lesser price if not free when compared to custom designs. The time taken is also less in using templates compared to coding from scratch. Let’s explore the advantages and disadvantages in a bit more detail.
Major advantages of website templates
Unlike custom-built websites, using website templates to make a business website may only take a shorter time as the development cycle is much less complicated. Another significant advantage of using templates is that it will cost less as far as your overall budget is concerned.
If you can do the job on your own, even without the knowledge of coding and expertise in designing tools, you can still build an excellent website using the template. Website templates now come with a lot of in-built features without requiring the users to be coding wizards to bring any functionality into it.
Disadvantages of the website templates
As these website templates are available online all across the globe, there are chances that other businesses may also be using the same templates to build their site. So, after some time, you may find that there are other websites too on the internet space, which exactly mimics your website layout. The viewers may also get confused about it by seeing many sites looking alike. Due to this, there is a chance that your website may get lost in the hectic internet space.
One another major issue related HTML template is that the templates aren’t built with the need for search engine optimization in mind. So, business websites built with standard templates were lingering at the bottom of the SERP’s. However, this issue is now mostly sorted out with the introduction of high-end search engine ready website templates.
The earlier issues of browser incompatibility and poor customer support had also been curbed to a large extent now with the new website templates. Now, when you choose a pre-built website template, it is much easy to customize it according to your priorities. Unlike the first generation HTML templates, fitting in the additional elements like images, text, videos, etc. has also become less challenging now with the modern innovative designs.
Who should consider a website template?
Irrespective of being a big or small business, if you are working on building a new website on a limited budget and also running short of time to create a full-fledged business template, then it is ideal to consider a prebuilt HTML template. Doing this will not only reduce cost and time but also can cut down the complications in the design processes. Also, if you are aren’t sure of what type of website template will suit you the best, then it is ideal for exploring thousands of options available in the HTML template repositories to find out the one which best matches your needs.
As we have seen the pros and cons of both custom website design and the option of prebuilt website templates, now it is your call to choose the best option based on your business needs and priorities to select the best possible option. The options of website templates are now being used widely by users with all kinds of requirements as the number of options available in it is increasing day by day. In every possibility, we can expect that ready-made website templates may replace the need for costly custom website design in the future. The options to choose are endless for everyone.