It can sometimes be hard to see the financial benefit of building a fresh and attractive website. Will the ends justify the means? Will I really see an improvement in business? The idea of cutting costs can be an appealing one, which makes picking up one of many free WordPress themes available on the internet or perhaps even buying a “premium” theme very attractive, as it provides a shortcut around paying for design hours. Despite the apparent savings however, a premade theme often costs more in the end.
Themes: The Bare-Bones of the Site
You are probably one of two people. The first is someone who isn’t particularly picky about what the site looks like – as long as the content is there. So why not grab any old theme that catches your eye and put it out there? The problem here is that if you’re legitimately looking for a bare-bones site in terms of functionality and design, it won’t take long for the stellar design team at Webspec Design to come up with something quick, eye-catching and, most importantly, unique. And should the next few months prove that your website is a valuable asset and you’d like to do more with it, building a site from the ground up means our programmers know the ins and outs of the site and it will be that much quicker to implement your new features.
Custom Website Design
This leads right into the other kind of person – someone who wants to do everything with the website. Photo galleries to shopping carts to rotating headers to forms that will complete your taxes for you – prebuilt themes often aren’t designed for this level of customization. In fact, they’re often designed for very minimal customization to be maintained by someone with no programming experience. Teaming with a company like Webspec Design gives you access to a team of industry pros who can get your site doing anything you need it to, but it’ll be very time consuming if we have to build on something someone else made first.
Professional Programming the First Time
In high school or college, perhaps you took a high-level math course, which inevitably meant group study sessions. Someone threw two pages of formulas and variables in your face and said “What am I doing wrong?” They probably looked at the problem an entirely different way than you did and their handwriting is indecipherable. That’s what it’s like trying to program on someone else’s pre-built theme, except not only do we not know how the other person approached the problem, but don’t even have our own work to look at. It’s much easier for us to go back through our own work to build a page that plays sound effects based on the visitor’s elevation in nautical miles and velocity in knots. And the quicker we can do it, the more money in your pocket.
In the same vein, since these themes aren’t built to be customized and expanded, they often don’t conform quite exactly to WordPress standards, or perhaps have hacked together their functionality by changing the way WordPress works. For many features you’d like to add to your site, there’s a WordPress plugin out there that will do most of the heavy lifting. This plugin assumes a clean WordPress install. Combining these two can often lead to conflicts that prevent code from working as intended, and it’s just more time on the bill for us to figure out why that is.
Your Website Should Stand Out
Beyond any of this, it’s important for your site to stand out. Lacking sufficient time to work on it, my current personal blog is mostly a free theme I found online before I really sank my teeth into web development. On at least one occasion, I’ve Googled something or other and come across a site that looked…exactly like mine. It’s disheartening and feels cheap, no matter how nice it looks, and that’s exactly what visitors will think if they’ve seen your site somewhere else before, which could lead them to take their business elsewhere.
It makes business sense – take the time to design a personal and well-branded website. Contact us here at Webspec Design to create a custom website that will encompass you and your business’ personality in a way that will set you apart from everyone else.
