Why Custom Web Design Is Better For Your Business
It’s official: your website is stuck in limbo. Your page speed is slower than snail mail, your bounce rate is climbing, and you’re not getting the quality leads you want. You already know it’s time to give your website some love.
Just like the famous folktale of the tortoise and the hare, you have a few options to consider for revamping your website.
Option 1: The Hare.
If getting your website up and running ASAP is your top priority, you can choose to go the fast and rushed route. Pick out a standard web theme, and go for a templated or out-of-the-box site. Template-based web design involves using pre-designed templates or themes that are customized with a business’s branding and content. Your new site will be up and running a lot faster. But, spoiler alert! You could fall behind your competition. With an out-of-the-box site, you could potentially lose out on leads since many templated sites are basic, bland, and forgettable.
Option 2: The Tortoise.
If you take the slow and steady approach, you have the opportunity to build a more flexible, adaptable website, with custom web design. Just like the tortoise, it will take you a little longer to get going, but once you do, your new and fresh custom design will allow you to stand out from the competition, bring in more customers, and get you across the finish line.
Custom web design is a more flexible, worthwhile undertaking. We’ve seen firsthand that custom web design can benefit your business for decades to come and outlast a generic, templated website. Let’s dive into the ins and outs of custom web design, review some real-world examples from a few of Intuitive Digital’s partners, and explore why it’s worth the extra investment in the long run.
What is Custom Web Design?
Custom web design allows you to customize each page of your website and tailor it to your needs, requirements, and goals. And, the best part is that the possibilities are pretty much limitless. You can add a playful animation to your homepage, find creative ways to display content, design a contact form that matches your brand, and so much more.
Here’s just a short list of the most common custom web design features:
- Custom page and post designs
- Creative CTA designs
- Unique forms
- Animations
- Branded illustrations and icons
- Mega menus
- Creative typography and use of color
Examples of Custom Web Design from Intuitive Digital
Let’s take a look at some examples of what custom web design looks like in action from two of Intuitive Digital’s awesome partners:
HiLine Homes
- The Deliverables: Full strategy, web design, and build.
- What We Did: Our web team was involved from the start to identify custom features and design them to work well for all users. We designed a clickable map to select the build region, created unique page designs for their floor plans with filtering and sorting, and an easy-to-use features map based on their end product.
Jacobs Heating
- The Deliverables: Full strategy, web design, and build, plus website copy.
- What We Did: Our web team was involved from the start to identify custom features and have them designed to work best for the user. We designed the home page, about page, and reusable modular blocks to work with the volume of copy needed for SEO. Custom illustrations and graphics added to an exclusive brand feel.
Why Should I Spend More For a Custom-Designed Website?
If you are still on the fence and not sure if you are ready to pony up the extra cost to design and build a custom website, here are four impactful benefits that prove why it’s a valuable investment that will grow your business.
1. Custom web design showcases your unique brand identity.
Custom web design allows your business to craft a website from the ground up that is perfectly calibrated to your brand’s backstory, values, target audience, and messaging. You can ensure your new website gives your brand a memorable and positive first impression that outshines your competitors.
Your web design should match the level of the product or service you are selling, highlighting your brand and speaking directly to your target audience. At Intuitive, we start by creating a style guide that visually represents your brand’s personality, icons, and colors. We then use this style guide to inform all of our custom web design decisions. Read more about our web design process.
2. Custom web design ensures a smooth user experience.
Custom web design provides a more engaging, memorable, and streamlined user experience than most out-of-the-box websites. This can result in a bunch of perks including higher website engagement rates, lower bounce rates, increased customer satisfaction, and stronger conversion rates. With a better UX, your new website can attract and retain new customers at higher rates and improve your ROI in no time.
3. Custom web design and development = enhanced SEO Performance.
Custom web design can also help to improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) by ensuring that the new site is structured properly and designed with SEO best practices in mind. With a custom-designed and SEO-optimized website, you can expect higher search engine rankings, more pageviews for your website content, and more conversions from organic search and other non-paid traffic sources like referral and direct traffic.
Is A Custom Website The Right Choice For My Brand?
At Intuitive, we often have several different use cases when we consider going the custom design route. Here are five examples that highlight when custom web design is a better option for your business.
1. Design is extremely important to your business.
If your business has a distinctive, memorable brand where the consistency of your brand across every customer interaction is crucial, then custom is the way to go.
Custom web design allows your brand to feel elevated and capture your brand’s identity in an online form. This improves the customer experience by having the same unique and distinctive experience whether they are visiting your store in person or shopping on your website.
2. Your business needs custom features for your services.
Custom web design combined with custom development allows you to create advanced features that are tailored to your business needs. For example, our partner Jacobs Heating wanted our web team to create a scheduling form that allows customers to request appointments online.
3. Your business is selling products that are not necessarily e-commerce.
We prefer custom web design for B2B or B2C businesses that have unique products that are not your typical e-commerce merchandise. In this case, you may want to consider using WordPress’s custom post-type functionality.
With custom post types, you essentially duplicate the blog functionality that uses posts instead of pages. By using posts, you can upload replicable content customized to your specific needs and then sort and filter the information using tags and categories, just like blog posts. For instance, you could use custom post types for unique products where you have the same information like price, description, size, color, category, etc. for each post without an “add to card” feature. We used custom post types to showcase HiLine Homes’ unique floor plans for their custom homes and for Buoy Beer’s selection of beer styles.
On Intuitive Digital’s website, we used a custom post type to create a new team page that includes a headshot, name, and job title for each of our team members.
Amplify Your Brand with Custom Web Design from Intuitive Digital
Custom web design is a great investment for your business. Investing in a custom-designed website will pay off in the long run by improving your user experience, increasing your online visibility, generating more leads, and driving more sales. It also allows for easier integration with other marketing strategies, such as PPC campaigns, paid social, or new landing pages.
In today’s highly competitive world, having a stellar website is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity. Investing in a custom web design can help you take your business to new heights and stay ahead of the competition, just like the tortoise scooching past the hare at the finish line. Let’s build a beautiful custom-designed website together! Contact us today to get started.
