Why a bespoke website is better for your business

Nov 20, 2020

You may be tempted by all the ‘build your own website’ tools out there, and as a small business start-up, the prices can certainly be appealing, but are they cost-effective in the long run? Depends how much you value your time.

If you’re okay with spending your evenings fiddling with your site-builder tool to make changes to your website, then go for it. If you’d rather enjoy your downtime relaxing, then a bespoke website is the answer. At the start of the project, you’ll fill out a Needs Analysis form – this outlines everything you want your site to do, such as bringing in more business (obviously) and/or performing some business functions that’ll make your life easier (customer application forms, automated order processing etc.). What people often miss at this stage, is that they need to be able to update their site as quickly as possible. You’ve got a business to run, you don’t want to be spending valuable hours formatting blocks of text in an online ‘page builder’ so it looks exactly the same as the other blocks of text. If you don’t then your site will look inconsistent and unprofessional.

Take the Clients page on this website as an example. On a simple page-builder this may involve editing the page; adding the client’s name; uploading their logo and a screengrab of their website; adding a bit of text about the project; then pasting in the review you’ve just been emailed from the client. If you hit “save”, the review goes public, but hang on – the client’s name is the wrong size font, and the wrong colour, the text is all over the place, the images are sitting on top of each other, and where’s that nice box around it that your friend who setup the site managed to add?

So you go back into the editor and highlight the client’s name, selecting a heading style. Easy enough, but it’s the wrong colour. You open up the colour picker and try to match the others on the page. It’s close enough so you move onto the testimonial text, highlight it, and make it bold. Okay, you’re getting there, but what about that fancy box around it all? After an hour, you give up and hit “save” – the review looks a bit better, but it’s still inconsistent with the others on the page. You weren’t to know that your friend added custom CSS classes around everything and applied this to a hidden setting box somewhere in the page editor to create the box effect. As a result, your site begins to look a bit like a randomly put-together church gazette.

Compare this with a bespoke site. You want a client page? Okay, how about this style? You’re presented, before the site is built, with a graphic showing you how the client panels will look. They’re in an even fancier box, with an element of your company’s branding. A fine border surrounds the text, which is rendered in a different font from the main copy on the site. Beside the text is the company logo, and a thumbnail, and beneath that a link to visit their site. It looks classy, professional, and may even encourage more clients to give you a glowing review so they can get that link back to their site.

So how would you do this on a bespoke site? Simple:

1. Click “Add Client”
2. Enter a few details into some simple input boxes; Paste the text from your client’s email; and upload their logo and thumbnail.
3. Hit publish.

That’s it. The panel would then appear on the page, styled the same way as all the others. The nice border, padding, and font-styles are all applied automatically. The whole thing has taken you about two minutes, and you can get back to running your business.

Bespoke input fields…

…make your life easier.

So, when you’re considering the costs of your new website, please remember to factor in your own time too. Over the years, this can soon add up to a significant amount.