Web design is a tricky business to be involved in. Everyone thinks they have a nephew somewhere who can knock out a web site in his spare time in a couple of hours. It’s easy, isn’t it?

Getting What You Pay For
As some people soon discover who choose to go this route, the nephew usually isn’t a web designer otherwise he’d be working full time in that profession. Any site that can be knocked out in an hour or so won’t be worth much to the business because it will lack any kind of focus on the business or the customer needs from that business.

Most likely it’ll be a free template that’s been tinkered with and not something a responsible business would ever consider using for their web site. So why should you?

How Bespoke Designs Benefit The Client
With bespoke web site design, all aspects of the site design can be modelled to the specific needs of the client and their customers. Careful consideration can be paid to all aspects of the site to ensure that it conveys the appropriate message, markets the business well and will be a successful addition to their offline endeavours.

The logo, existing business colour choices and other marketing image materials can be included in the design choices to ensure that the web site matches the existing look of the business. This way the site design will be appropriate for what’s already part of the business brand while perhaps polishing up the rough edges to bring the look into the present at the same time.

Email newsletter opt-in areas can be designed to look similar to the magazine that the company sends out to its customers. Product pages on e-commerce sites can be adjusted to mimic the information contained in the company brochure or mail order catalogue which will help increase conversion rates.

Just the right shopping cart can be added to the site to enable e-commerce. One that is the easiest to use, accepts multiple payment methods suitable for the UK market as well as globally, and is reliable. Multi-currency options and simple methods to add new products to the shopping cart catalogue are just some of the benefits of going bespoke with a web studio that has design experience going back many years.

Why Free Templates Do More Harm Than Good
Free template themes lack any of this carefully crafted direction with site structure to make navigation easier, familiar design elements and tweaks to help improve conversion rates to boost sales.

No thought has gone into why a design should look, feel and function a certain way. A template like this is just a generic look that was created by a designer without any business or customer in mind. This is why free templates tend to fall flat with visitors who’ve often already seen the same template used on numerous sites they’ve visited. They feel no particular sense of identification with any business that doesn’t have an online identity.

Branding and presentation matter greatly even to a smaller business. In fact, it possibly matters even more because there is far less money available for advertising to promote their brand to customers repeatedly. The first impression is often all they’ll get and it won’t come again.

WordPress Themes
WordPress is a content management system that can be used to create interesting-looking web sites. Unique themes can be produced for WordPress which provide an enticing design that attracts visitors. Custom themes can be shaped to suit the exacting needs of the business’s customers. WordPress and other CMS platforms like Joomla and Drupal are useful to provide a common starting point to work with.

One of the other benefits of these systems is that new content can be added more easily than with static web sites where each page has to be created manually. Once a client learns how the system works, this provides more freedom to clients who are confident enough with it to learn how to add new pages or posts to what has been provided already. Additional custom pages can be designed and added to an expanding site as well. This can be handled by people like us here at off the peg design as the site’s needs grow with business expansion.

Going bespoke doesn’t need to cost the earth, Get in touch to find out more