BC Business
Bespoke suitWhile bespoke suits are a nice luxury, the reality is that most of us, most of the time, buy off the rack.
When to spend on an expensive website, and when to reign it in. Over the past five years, I've earned a living by producing custom websites, and while it can be a rewarding endeavour to build a site from scratch, in truth, it's often much more work and money than people can justify.
Over the past five years, I’ve earned a living by producing custom websites, and while it can be a rewarding endeavour to build a site from scratch, in truth, it’s often much more work and money than people can justify.
Seth Godin’s blog proves that you don’t need a custom-designed website to make a dent in the online universe: the marketing guru’s writing more than makes up for the boilerplate design. That said, you’d probably think twice about hiring a web designer who didn’t have a stand-out site of his or her own.
As a general rule, if you’re a self-employed professional or run a small brick-and-mortar business, you probably don’t need to spend a lot of money on custom web work – a template or “theme” that someone else has built, and which you can license for a small fee, will serve you well. On the other hand, if your company relies on generating leads and sales in a competitive landscape online, you shouldn’t hesitate to invest big bucks in your site.
Here are a few other considerations to help you decide between template vs custom web design.
Building a great custom website takes months of attention from the designer that you hire, plus that of at least one member of your team. With a template, you can be live in under an hour, and you can collaborate on content before (and after) the site is launched – all without a web designer’s help.
A custom design can be 100 times more expensive than a templated one, and that’s assuming you’re getting a good deal from your designer. Expect to pay between $15-$250 for a premium template, compared to at least $15,000 for a custom job from a local agency.
If you have a template budget but custom requirements, there is also the option of hiring a designer to modify an existing theme. This is more likely to cost you a few thousand, not tens of thousands, of dollars. My personal brand site, for example, is just a customized version of the template we built for my corporate site, and while the function is much the same, it still looks unique.
Of the thousands of template vendors out there, I like StudioPress, WooThemes and Pixel Union the best. You’ll have to decide on a publishing platform as well (i.e., one that’s compatible with template-based solutions). I love WordPress for marketing sites, and Tumblr for personal blogs; both have a plethora of beautiful themes to choose from.
While bespoke suits are a nice luxury, the reality is that most of us, most of the time, buy off the rack (perhaps with a few alterations). Same goes for most of the consumer products we enjoy: only the economy of scale offered by mass production makes almost any of it affordable. So unless your business is based on standing out from the crowd online, why should your website be any different?