Does Your Business Actually Need a Custom Website?

What is a custom website design?

When we talk about custom website design, we don’t mean developing every component of a website from scratch. We mean starting with the requirements of the business and its customers, rather than starting with a pre-designed theme and adapting the business to fit within it.

At Brown & Brown, most of the websites we develop today use established platforms such as WordPress and WooCommerce. They provide proven foundations for content management and ecommerce, but the websites themselves are designed and developed around the particular project. We create bespoke themes, content structures and user journeys, then use established plugins and third-party services where they provide the right functionality.

Where the requirements go beyond what those systems provide, we can develop custom functionality and integrations around them. That might be something relatively small, or it might mean connecting an ecommerce website with an ERP such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Custom website development is therefore less about building everything from scratch and more about having the freedom to make the right decisions for the business.

What are the benefits of custom website design?

The main benefit of a custom website isn’t simply that it looks different from everybody else’s. It is that decisions about design, content, functionality and technology can be made around what the website actually needs to achieve.

Sometimes that requirement is straightforward. Sometimes the website sits within a much more complicated commercial or operational environment. The value of a bespoke approach is being able to respond appropriately to either without allowing the limitations of a pre-existing theme to determine the solution.

1. Start with the business, not the template

Off-the-shelf themes and website builders necessarily begin with decisions that have already been made. Page layouts, navigation patterns, content blocks and functionality are provided for you, and the job becomes adapting your content and brand to work within them.

With a bespoke approach, those decisions come later. We start by understanding the business, its customers, what it needs to communicate and what people need to accomplish through the website.

• Brand: The visual design can reflect the character and positioning of the organisation rather than the styling available within a particular theme.
• Content: Page structures can be designed around the information customers actually need.
• User journeys: Navigation and calls to action can reflect how people research and buy your particular products or services.
• Commercial objectives: The website can be designed around what the business is actually trying to achieve rather than a generic definition of what a website should contain.

This doesn’t necessarily result in a more complicated website. The right solution might be a relatively simple WordPress site with a bespoke design and carefully considered content structure. The important difference is that the requirement determines the website, rather than the template determining the requirement.

2. Design around how customers actually behave

A good website should make it easy for the right people to find the information they need and take an appropriate next step. Understanding what that journey looks like isn’t always straightforward.

This is why our work often starts before design and continues long after a website has launched. Search data, analytics and observed user behaviour can reveal that customers don’t navigate a website in the way the organisation expects them to.

Our ongoing work with Country House Weddings is a good example. Its digital presence spans the main Country House Weddings brand and individual venue websites, while prospective couples may discover one venue through search or advertising and subsequently move between several venues before making an enquiry. Our work therefore includes UX, content, analytics and paid search as part of understanding those journeys and continually improving how the websites support them.

Similarly, our work with TGA Mobility has involved examining how people navigate and interact with its existing website, using analytics and behavioural data alongside search and content analysis to identify where product discovery and customer journeys can be improved.

3. Structure content around the decisions customers need to make

Different businesses have fundamentally different information requirements. A manufacturer with thousands of technical components should not organise its website in the same way as a wedding venue, a professional services company or a local retailer.

This becomes particularly important when the way a business manages information internally isn’t necessarily the way its customers understand it.

Hydrastore, for example, has an extensive catalogue of hydraulic components alongside its wider systems engineering capabilities. Product information needs to work with the company’s underlying business systems, but customers still need to be able to navigate, search and filter those products according to the characteristics that matter when selecting a component.

Limehouse Paperboard Mills presents a different challenge. Its website needs to communicate a broad manufacturing capability while also making detailed information about available board stock useful to customers. Its online stock list is populated from stock data supplied by the company’s existing systems, allowing information such as board weight, thickness, sheet dimensions and availability to be presented through the website without treating that operational data as conventional website content.

4. Use WordPress and WooCommerce without being constrained by them

Using a bespoke theme doesn’t mean rejecting established software. In fact, we generally prefer not to develop functionality that a mature and well-supported product already provides effectively.

WordPress provides an established content management system. WooCommerce provides a substantial ecommerce platform. Plugins and third-party services can provide everything from payments and forms to bookings and specialist functionality.

The difference is that these become components of the solution rather than the starting point for deciding how the website should work.

For DJ Gemmill Training Services, for example, WooCommerce and established booking functionality provide the foundations for selling courses and experiences online. Most of the requirement could be handled by existing software, but its multi-day courses didn’t quite behave in the way the standard booking functionality expected. We customised that particular part rather than replacing a system that otherwise did the job perfectly well.

Brickwall Farm similarly combines WordPress and WooCommerce with an external specialist booking service. Customers can explore its holiday accommodation through the website and check availability through the booking provider, while WooCommerce handles the separate sale of products from the farm.

Custom development doesn’t mean maximising the amount of custom code. It means being able to use the right combination of established and bespoke technology for the requirement.

5. Develop bespoke functionality where it adds genuine value

Sometimes standard functionality gets most of the way there. Sometimes a business requirement is sufficiently specific that custom development is the more appropriate solution.

That can involve surprisingly small details. A particular product may need to be presented differently, a booking process may need to follow different rules, or content editors may need controls that aren’t available through a standard WordPress setup.

At the other end of the scale, substantial custom functionality can sit behind an otherwise familiar WordPress or WooCommerce website.

Hydrastore is a good example. Its current website uses WordPress and WooCommerce, but significant custom development is required to accommodate the complexity of its hydraulic product catalogue, product families and variants, technical specifications, search and filtering, downloadable information and the distinction between products that can be purchased online and those that require an enquiry.

The customer doesn’t need to know which parts are standard WooCommerce and which are bespoke. The objective is for those technologies to work together as one coherent website.

6. Connect the website with the systems the business already uses

For many established businesses, the website is only one part of a much larger technology landscape.

Product information may already be managed through an ERP. Customer relationships may live in a CRM. Properties may be managed through specialist agency software. Stock information may originate in an internal manufacturing system. Asking staff to maintain the same information independently on the website creates duplicated work and increases the risk of different systems disagreeing with one another.

Hydrastore’s ecommerce website is integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, allowing product, pricing, stock and order information to move between the website and the systems used to operate the business. Completed web orders can be passed back into Business Central for processing rather than existing as an isolated stream of website transactions.

At Limehouse Paperboard Mills, stock information exported from existing business systems is automatically processed and made available to the website’s stock-list functionality. The website therefore provides customers with useful information derived from operational data without requiring somebody to recreate and maintain that information manually in WordPress.

Percival & Company provides another example. Its property portfolio is already managed through REAPIT, so we developed an integration that synchronises sales and lettings information with the website, including property details, prices, availability, photographs, floorplans, EPCs, brochures and virtual tours.

The principle is the same in each case: where the business already has an appropriate system for managing information, the website should work with it rather than creating another system for staff to maintain.

7. Build a website that can continue to be improved

Launching a website shouldn’t mark the point at which decisions about it stop.

One of the advantages of developing a website around a flexible platform such as WordPress, with a theme and content structure that we control, is that it gives us room to respond as the business, its customers and the evidence change.

That might mean creating new landing pages in response to search demand, changing the way products are categorised, improving calls to action after observing how visitors use a page, introducing new functionality or connecting the website with another business system.

Our work with Country House Weddings and TGA Mobility demonstrates why this matters even where we weren’t responsible for the original website build. Website performance isn’t solely a development question. We use search data, analytics and user behaviour to understand what is happening, identify where customers are encountering difficulties and determine what should change.

For websites we design and develop ourselves, considering that future work from the outset means the underlying theme and content structures don’t have to become obstacles to improvement later.

8. Retain greater control over performance and SEO

A bespoke website does not automatically rank higher in Google, and an off-the-shelf theme does not prevent a website from performing well in search. Search performance depends on content, relevance, authority, competition, technical implementation and many other factors.

What bespoke theme development gives us is greater control over the technical decisions that influence how a website performs for users and search engines.

• Performance: The front end can be developed around the functionality the website actually requires rather than automatically inheriting everything supplied by a general-purpose theme.
• Technical SEO: URL structures, headings, metadata, structured data, internal linking and indexation can be considered as part of the website architecture.
• Content structure: Templates can be developed around the different types of information the business actually needs to publish.
• Ongoing optimisation: We have greater freedom to respond when search data, analytics or user behaviour identifies an opportunity for improvement.

The advantage isn’t that Google inherently prefers custom code. It doesn’t. The advantage is that fewer technical and structural decisions have been made in advance by somebody who knew nothing about your business, content or customers.

Custom WordPress website vs an off-the-shelf theme or website builder

There isn’t a universal winner. The appropriate choice depends on what the website needs to achieve and how much value there is in designing specifically around those requirements.

The important distinction isn’t that one approach is inherently good and the other bad. It is how much freedom each gives you to respond to the requirements of the particular business.

When is an off-the-shelf website the better choice?

Not every business needs a bespoke WordPress website. Platforms such as Squarespace and other template-based systems can provide an effective way to establish a professional online presence quickly and economically, particularly where the requirements are conventional.

An off-the-shelf approach may make more sense if:

• Your website primarily needs to explain who you are, what you do and how customers can contact you.
• Your content fits comfortably within conventional page and portfolio structures.
• You don’t have unusual product, ecommerce or integration requirements.
• Existing functionality already provides everything your customers need.
• There is little commercial benefit in developing functionality or content structures specifically for your business.
• Your available budget would produce a greater return if invested elsewhere, such as content, photography, SEO or advertising.

A simpler solution isn’t an inferior solution if it meets the requirement properly. There is little value in paying for bespoke design and development simply for the sake of being able to say that a website is bespoke.

The limitations become more important when the website needs to reflect something distinctive about the business: its brand, a complicated product range, an unusual customer journey, specialist functionality, integration with another system or content that doesn’t fit comfortably into the structures available.

The question isn’t whether an off-the-shelf theme is good or bad. It’s whether it gives you enough freedom to build the website your business actually needs.

Is a custom website worth the investment?

That depends on what the additional investment allows the business to achieve.

If a bespoke website simply recreates something that could have been achieved just as effectively using an existing theme or website builder, it is difficult to make a compelling case for the additional cost.

The calculation changes when bespoke design or development removes a meaningful compromise.

That might mean:

• presenting a distinctive brand without working within a pre-existing design;
• structuring a large or specialist body of information around the way customers actually use it;
• creating a customer journey around the way people choose your particular products or services;
• making complex products easier to search, compare or understand;
• automating a process that would otherwise require staff time;
• connecting the website with ERP, CRM or other systems already used by the business;
• or retaining enough control over the website to continue improving it as evidence and requirements change.

The return doesn’t therefore have to come solely from attracting more visitors. It might come from increasing enquiries or sales, but it can also come from reducing administration, improving the quality of enquiries, removing duplicated processes, improving customer experience or allowing the website to support parts of the business that an off-the-shelf solution could not.

How does custom web design affect long-term SEO performance?

Custom website design can provide a strong foundation for SEO, but being bespoke is not itself a ranking factor.

A well-developed custom WordPress theme gives us greater control over areas including website architecture, page templates, internal linking, structured data, performance and how different types of content are presented to search engines.

That becomes particularly useful as SEO work develops over time. Search data might reveal that customers describe a product differently from the business, that an important subject deserves its own landing page, or that the existing information architecture makes useful content unnecessarily difficult to discover.

Because we aren’t restricted to the options anticipated by an off-the-shelf theme, the website can be adapted in response to that evidence.

But custom development is no substitute for useful content, appropriate search targeting, authority or ongoing analysis. A well-configured template website with excellent content can outperform a bespoke website that has not been properly optimised.

The benefit is control and flexibility, not an automatic advantage in Google’s search results.

Do you need a web design agency to build a custom website?

If your requirements are straightforward and you are comfortable working with an established website builder, you may not need an agency at all. Modern platforms make it possible to create capable websites without commissioning a bespoke design and development process.

An agency becomes more valuable when deciding what should be built requires a broader understanding of the business.

That can mean understanding the brand and its customers, planning information architecture and user journeys, analysing search behaviour, considering how content will be managed, identifying opportunities to simplify business processes and understanding how the website may need to interact with existing technology.

It also means continuing to question those decisions once the website is in use. The work we now undertake across websites such as Hydrastore, Country House Weddings and TGA Mobility spans development, UX, content, search, analytics and digital marketing because those disciplines increasingly affect one another.

For more complicated projects, writing the code is only one part of the job. The more important task is understanding the requirement well enough to decide what should be designed specifically for the business, what should use established technology and what doesn’t need building at all.

So, does your business actually need a custom website?

Possibly, but bespoke design and development should be a means to an end rather than the objective itself.

If an established theme or website-building platform already provides everything your business and customers need, it may be the quickest and most economical solution. If working within that system means compromising the brand, content, customer experience or the way the business itself operates, a bespoke approach starts to offer much more meaningful value.

And bespoke doesn’t have to mean complicated. We can build a relatively straightforward WordPress website around the specific requirements of a business, or use the same underlying platform as the foundation for ecommerce, custom functionality and integrations with systems such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

The principle is the same: understand the business problem first, then choose the design and technology appropriate to solving it.

If you’re weighing up an off-the-shelf platform against a bespoke website, or you’ve reached the point where your existing website is beginning to constrain what you want to do, talk to us about what your business actually needs.