Your company is one of a kind—and your website should be, too. First impressions are crucial and if your website is outdated, stale or hard to navigate, customers will click elsewhere.
Custom website design can take your business to a new level. Now, we must acknowledge that template- or theme-based websites have come a long way and there are tons of options now. They’re economical and generally pretty easy to set up. For some, this is definitely the way to go, but for others, custom web design is necessary.
Custom Design is Personal and User-Friendly
Personalized design really resonates with your audience and helps solidify your brand.
Your logo, your photo placement, layout, calls to action, navigation, the toolbar options, colors, flash features, live chatting, backend project management—all are your choice in custom web design making it easy to guide your company image.
As for user experience, this should be the primary focus when developing a custom site. You want easy navigation, you want the proper information on all the pages and you want calls to action that will get people to act. At Happy Dog, our custom web design approach starts making sure websites are mobile-friendly, or responsive. That means that no matter how a user comes to your website, they will be able to navigate without headaches.
So, to sum it all up, your audience will get a user experience designed just for them, while your company earns good marks for creating a great first impression and a memorable brand. If all goes as planned, this will mean ROI with more traffic and more contacts.
The differentiator is that custom design and development forms the website around you, not you trying to bend your design and marketing goals around a template.
Online Marketing Boost
Quality, custom websites can also help with your marketing efforts online. Custom designed websites are more SEO-friendly because the experts are able to include keyword considerations, ensure browser compatibility, page speed, quality coding and more to make it as search engine friendly as possible.
On top of this, there should be no extra bloat. A custom design should never have “module powered by,” “Website powered by” or anything similar. Google views a cleanly coded website that performs fast in a better light than a website that uses a template loaded with bloat or extras that you just don’t need. This can include extra JavaScript and CSS files and even poorly coded third-party extensions.
Your Brand Will Get a Competitive Edge
We think this one pretty much speaks for itself. If you invest a little time, thought, cash and trust in a developer, you’ll definitely be able to compete with or crush your competition.
How you ask? It’s simple. If your competition is missing their marketing goals, target audience or even turning off their current audience with their web presence. Just make your website better than theirs—your audience (and potentially theirs) will thank you.
Compared to the Average Marketing Budget, It’s More Affordable Than You Think
Let me tell you, we aren't the cheapest solution. We never will claim or aim to be that. We are a premium solution. That being said, your company doesn’t need an insane marketing budget to make a custom website happen this year. We have worked on a number of different projects and we’ve created incredibly cool websites with lots of added features for as low as $12,000. Recently, it seems that a lot of our projects have fallen in the $18,000 to $30,000 range.
And, if I may use a Chipotle analogy right now, it’s like making the decision to pay a little extra to add guacamole—you’ll never be sorry.
Thinking about custom software or website design?
