How Bespoke Website Design Can Boost Your Business Income
With DIY online website design platforms popping up right and left, it’s easy to think that you’ll do just fine with the “choose a template and go” approach. But while that might cut it for a hobbyist’s website or a simple personal blog, a business website requires a higher degree of personalisation and sophistication than you can achieve with the DIY approach. That’s where bespoke website design comes in.
Bespoke website design boosts your business income by saving time, providing more customisation options, enhancing SEO, improving customer satisfaction, and helping your business stand out from the crowd.
Read on to learn more about bespoke website design, how much it costs, and the various ways it can boost your business income.
What is bespoke website design?
Understanding any complex phrase helps to strip it down to its elements, define the most complicated terms, and then piece everything together. It’s somewhat an unorthodox approach, but it helps with understanding.
Let’s do that for the term bespoke website design.
The Oxford dictionary concurs that bespoke means “custom-made” or anything else along the lines of tailor-made. Basically, referring to something as “bespoke” is a fancy way of saying that it was created for a specific purpose/person.
On the other hand, web design is what determines the usability and aesthetics of your website. It’s what gives your website the right layout, information flow, colour scheme, and other visual and functional characteristics experienced by the end-user (i.e., your website visitors).
If we piece everything together…
Bespoke website design means creating a website with visual and functional characteristics optimised for a specific end-user group or purpose. If a service provider offers a bespoke website design, they’ll create your website from scratch, optimising its aesthetics and usability for your audience.
I italicised “from scratch” for a reason:
Sometimes, WordPress web design service providers will create a unique template for one customer一hat qualifies as bespoke website design, so no problem here. Things get fishy when the next customer places an order. Some companies will tweak a few pixels here and there from the original template and pass it on to the customer as a “bespoke website,” which is quite misleading.
At Sanders, we believe that if it was created from a template, it’s not bespoke. Your website design should be based strictly on your needs and not what’s already out there. That’s precisely why all our bespoke website designs are born out of a blank canvas to give you a truly unique website.
How much should a bespoke website design cost?
According to Godaddy (one of the world’s largest domain registrars), web designers typically charge more than £10,000 per bespoke website design. Mind you; this figure doesn’t include annual recurring costs, which can be well above £1,000.
However, Sanders’ pricing is way more favourable than Godaddy’s estimate. Our bespoke web design prices start at £995. The exact amount will depend on the size, style, and functionality features of your website.
Why should I work with a designer?
Working with a designer may mean spending more than you would if you take the DIY route to website creation, but it pays off in other ways, especially if you look at the bigger picture.
Here are some of the benefits of hiring a designer.
It saves time
Designing any business website is a time-consuming process regardless of how much you try to keep things simple. Even if you start with a template, you’ll still have to spend hours tweaking things here and there to make sure that your website doesn’t end up looking like thousands of other websites created using that same template.
Designing a bespoke website is even more work since it starts with a blank canvas instead of a template. Writing code, choosing the right colour scheme, adjusting pixels, optimising for functionality and competitiveness are merely the tip of the iceberg.
Things can be worse if you don’t have the necessary web design skills because that means you’ll have to spend hours learning how to do everything yourself. And even after spending all that time learning and designing your site, there are no guarantees that you’ll create a better site than a professional designer.
That’s why working with a designer is always recommended for business owners. As an entrepreneur, you likely have other roles to play in steering your business to success. Sure, you might not be involved in the day-to-day operations, but you likely have an administrative role.
All these things take time that could’ve been put to better use as far as growing your business is concerned. Hiring a designer frees up this time, ensuring that your business doesn’t slow down or even come to a complete halt just because you’re trying to get it online.
What’s more, professionals take much less time to design a bespoke website than the average person. So hiring one not only frees up your schedule but also speeds up the process of getting your business online.
You get more customisation options
One of the most significant issues with template websites is that they don’t provide as much room for customisation as their bespoke counterparts. Sure, the generic template you purchase might allow you to change minor things like the logos, images, and colour scheme.
However, that’s pretty much all you get in terms of customisation flexibility. You can change very little in the underlying code. That’s why even after a template site has been” customised,” any experienced web designer or developer can notice some similarities with other sites created from the same template.
On the other hand, working with a designer gives you complete control of your website’s functionality and appearance.
You can dictate everything about your site by providing your designer with a detailed overview of your website requirements. Once they have these, they’ll spend time studying every detail to understand your needs and then translate that into a truly unique website that conforms to your business needs and brand identity一take. A look at our design process to get a better idea of what I’m talking about.
Plus, most designers will make changes to the design if you’re not satisfied with it. Why? Because they, too, are running a business and leaving a client unsatisfied doesn’t do any good to their reputation, especially in this day and age where consumer reviews are so crucial.
You get technical support
It’s not uncommon to run into technical problems when running a website, whether they stem from bad code, invalid links, or the need for updates. When these issues strike, they’re generally best handled by the person who designed the website.
Now, if you take the DIY route to website design and run into technical issues, you’ll have to try and figure out things by yourself. It might seem like something you can handle, but troubleshooting a website isn’t common knowledge.
Working with a professional designer is an entirely different story.
Most of the time, a web designer will teach you how to carry out routine maintenance. And depending on who you work with, you may also get ongoing technical support to help you out when things get murky. Sure, you might have to pay for this, but it’s better to have the original designer handle maintenance than hire a different professional.
How will a bespoke web design give my business a competitive advantage?
We’ve explored the benefits of working with a professional when designing your business in the previous section. However, those aren’t exactly the same as giving your business a competitive edge (which is probably what you’re looking to achieve by creating a custom website).
Here are some of the ways a bespoke website design can help you stay ahead of the competition.
A bespoke design enhances SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is arguably the most critical competitiveness tool for any business with an online presence. Your search ranking is a function of several factors, and among these is your site’s page load speed. Generally, the longer a page takes to load, the lower it’ll rank.
The quality of your website’s coding significantly affects the page load speed. Specifically, substandard front-end coding can slow down a site even if you get other aspects of search engine optimisation right. Typically, this is what you get when you opt for an off-the-shelf website template: the code is almost always bang average.
On the other hand, bespoke websites are built with the latest W3C HTML and CSS standards. This improves page load speed, which gives your site a better chance of ranking higher than the competition.
Fast loading pages aren’t just great for Search Engine Optimisation; they also help keep potential customers on your website longer, increasing your chances of making a sale. Don’t believe me? Research has found that 53% of mobile users will leave any webpage that takes more than three seconds to load.
It’s also worth noting that page load speed isn’t’ the only aspect of SEO that a bespoke website design helps with. A bespoke site is also built with other SEO factors in mind, from mobile optimisation to ease of navigation.
A bespoke website sets you apart from the competition
Whether you’re selling a service or product, the last thing you want is to look and operate like the competition. Instead, you want to stand out from the crowd. This is known as differentiation in business and is one of the best ways to gain a competitive advantage.
A bespoke website gives you the chance to build a truly unique online presence for your business. With the right designer, you can build a one-of-a-kind site that highlights what sets your business’s unique selling point.
Alternatively, your bespoke website designer may suggest an extra feature on your site that might help with customer satisfaction, reducing costs, etc. As long as no competitor has such a feature, it can be a source of competitive advantage.
Keep in mind that these are just a few examples: the possibilities are virtually endless when using a unique website design to get a leg up on the competition. All you need is a bit of creativity, an understanding of your consumer’s needs, and of course, a rockstar bespoke website designer to bring your differentiation idea to life.
A bespoke website improves customer satisfaction
I’ve somewhat touched on this in other parts of the post, but I’m yet to demonstrate how a bespoke website improves customer satisfaction. I also haven’t explained how customer satisfaction can be a source of competitive advantage.
Let me do just that.
Generally, a customer’s level of satisfaction is a function of the quality of the experience they’ve had when interacting with your business. The better the experience, the more satisfied the customer will be.
A customer’s experience on your website depends on how it looks and feels appealing to their personal preferences and its functionality (e.g., does your site keep redirecting them to the wrong page? Is it taking too long to load? Do all the buttons work? Is it mobile friendly? And so on).
What this means is that if the aesthetics and functionality of your site don’t appeal to your audience, customer satisfaction will take a hit, and you might end up losing some of your customers to the competition.
With a bespoke website design, you turn the tables on the competition. How? Because a bespoke website design is guided by your target customer’s needs and preferences. So with such a site, you’ll likely steal customers from the competition, and not the other way round.
Winding-up
If you’re convinced that the benefits of a tailor-made website outweigh the initial cost一which is true, in case you’re still doubting – and need an expert to design one for your business, get in touch.
Sanders Design competitive prices, and our bespoke website designs leave little to be desired. And if you need ongoing support or something changed here and there, we’ll be more than happy to help. But don’t just take our word for it; come and find out why we’ve been churning out happy clients for the last 16 years.
