Why Choose Custom Web Development

When you are developing a website for your business, you are well aware that you are up against some stiff competition online. It’s tough to impress and attract customers who have a lot of choices. In such a scenario, a website can be a great tool for businesses of all sizes to try and create that great first impression for potential customers or even existing customers.

Since most potential new customers first do web research and visit a company’s website before ever setting foot in a physical store, it’s quite critical for brick-and-mortar businesses to have a strong website. Of course, for E-commerce websites, the website itself is their ‘store’ and hence they can ill-afford to have a website that is less than spectacular.

Characteristic of a Great Website
What makes a great website? Well, a website should be user-friendly and it should be fast-loading. A modern website should be mobile-friendly (since more than half of Internet users now a days are using mobiles to surf the Web) and use responsive design (so that it renders equally well on a 25-inch desktop screen as well as an 11-inch tablet or 5-inch smartphone).

A great website should be Search Engine Optimized and that is something which one should keep in mind before starting web development rather than something to be implemented after the website is finished. SEO one of the hardest things to accomplish and can be one of the most complex. SEO takes human expertise and inputs from SEO experts and it is not something which can be bought off-the-shelf. Search Engine Optimization needs to be built in before your web development process is finished as when it is kept in mind, things such as: Tags, W3C validation, Header and more aspects are thought of during the web development process.

Custom Web Development Leads to Great Websites
To get all these characteristics of a great website right, you need to go for custom web development. Templates may be commonplace and cool looking, even cheap (if not entirely free), but they come with drawbacks. A ready-to-use website template is possibly not quite unique looking — it’s a template after all. You might choose to use a good-looking free template but then if it’s free and looks great, many others might similarly opt for it too. There is no point in having a website with the same look as about another thousand websites out there. If you’re developing a restaurant website and use a restaurant ‘theme’ or template, then possibly there will be other restaurant websites too who use the same template.

Depending on your requirements, you may wish to opt for a Content Management System (CMS) which increases the complexity of the project. There are many open-source CMS systems out there — such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, all of which have their own unique advantages and disadvantages. Only by opting to work with a professional web development firm will you get web development experts with experience on those CMS platforms. Clearly, custom web development is the way to go.

SEO, Digital Marketing & Other Benefits
Of course, custom web development at professional web development firms will lead to aesthetically pleasing outcomes. Custom web development will also no doubt lead to the creation of a technically robust website that hits all the checkboxes in terms of adopting the best practices of web development. Web development is complex and the technology has moved on from 5 years ago or even 1 year ago. So, a contemporary website will have those responsive design principles embedded as well as infinite scrolling features if needed. A modern website will use HTML5 technology as an example which has many advantages over one that doesn’t. It will have CSS which aids faster loading and makes the code base leaner, has cross-browser compatibility and offline-browsing capability among other benefits.

Above all, for businesses of any size, their website is their calling card and they need to have a plan to market their business. Digital marketing is the name of the game today as most potential customers will discover your business via a search phrase typed into a search engine.

With the right SEO implemented by experienced professionals, you get a website with proper SEO that search engines will be able to find easily. When search engine crawlers ‘like’ your website, they crawl it and index it which will in turn display it in the search results making your website visible to countless search users.

There is no better way to promote your business than by rising through the rankings on the search engine results pages. That is the organic part of search of course. When that is not enough and you are a business who is looking to expand quickly, you can opt for PPC or display advertising. All these constitute various facets of the overall activity known as digital marketing. In addition, let’s not forget about the immense power of Social Media which can be leveraged when you are working with a good web development company.

A website that is custom-designed and developed is more suited for digital marketing since a custom-designed and developed website is truly flexible and you can implement any needed changes — whether that is adding schema.org markup to the website or adding a blog. The great benefit of opting for web development companies is that you get all these solutions and more under one roof.

Conclusion
With custom web development, you get a great website that will suit all your changing needs. While it may require greater investment of money in the beginning, in the long run it definitely makes more sense than taking a short cut like using off-the-shelf templates. When you opt for custom web development, you save yourself a lot of headaches in the long term.

For your custom web development or digital marketing needs, drop us a line to speak to our professionals and we will be happy to assist you here at Mind Digital Group.