Stock template or Custom Website, which one to use when building a high quality website?

Before you commence on a web project for your company or organisation, it's a good idea to get an overall picture of the actions that produce a successful website. While you think that wordpress website development means simply turning text and pictures into Internet-ready code, in reality, this is a relatively minor part of the process. Your content (i.e. text, images, etc.) is basically just a raw data. it takes time, proper planning and skill to turn this raw data into usable information. This ultimately affects the bottom line of your business or organisation in a positive manner.

First of all, when you begin the process of website development following terminologies should be kept in mind—

• Website structure: This is a very important step in the process. Your sitemap is the blueprint of your site’s architecture and it will continue to guide you all throughout the design, so make sure you put some thinking into it.
• Target audience: You should know whom you are catering, understanding audience behaviour, why people are coming to your website and what they want from your website etc.
• Marketing strategies: In the beginning itself, discussing the advertising & marketing blueprint is also crucial. This can give you a more realistic understanding of pricing and expected outcomes.

• Content & quality: Content must be spell-checked, typography choice & colour themes must be decided as per your brand, header design, use of elements like shapes, vectors, illustrations, etc must be finalised before you begin.
• Trust is must: Looks does matter but only if your content is trustworthy. Why would someone trust your website? By your company values, team, history, location, qualifications and many other factors.
• Search-engine friendly: Making the website SEO friendly is very much essential nowadays; supporting schema.org tags, using meta tags, proper URL naming, keywords etc. in order to increase footfall on your website.
• Performance: Creating a website with high-quality images, animations etc is good. But if your website is taking too much time to load, it adversely affects your website’s performance. Your website should load quickly (Because Google loves it!). Watch out for memory intensive plugins or conflicting plugins etc.
• Backup & security:  Another very important aspect which is mostly overlooked is security. Security from hackers is important. From weak passwords to locking various features, keeping non-default values (like we never use admin as a user, and we get so many hack attempts prevented just because of this) should be considered important. Periodic backups should be taken in order to cope up with adverse situations.
• Multiple languages: In order to establish a healthy audience relationship, the language should not become a barrier. Multi-Language support is required when your audience needs to see things they can relate to. This requires template changes, plugins and most importantly converting all the content into other languages.

Before you start worrying about colour schemes and domain names, you’ve got to decide what platform you’re going to build your website with. Older website development makes use of HTML, CSS and even Flash. Current development focuses on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Another important area of focus nowadays is responsive website design services or mobile friendly design.

We use 4 major methods/types for good business website design—

1. Website build around a template or a theme - Themes such as that provided by Template Monster or Theme Forest etc. are stock templates. In this we ask for website structure and content, find relevant images and configure the website. Installing WordPress, template, plugins, adding security and content. This is mostly customer driven content, not well written and even not search-engine friendly. This forms a major drawback. In terms of looks, it’s good. But internally they are not clean. This type of website designing is usually good for quick tests or something where such crucial details are not needed, or for one-page websites.
2. Website built around genesis - While genesis is called a theme, it’s really just a framework and child themes (barebones). This gives an excellent head start into high quality. The best part is, due to this structure the core theme keeps getting lifetime updates and child themes are mostly immune to that. For this, we need to design custom template. Note that even with a custom template we haven’t yet touched some of the psychology aspects.
3. High-quality websites - These types of websites use some of the aspects of high-quality design like user workflows and simple personas. They take much more time to design, develop but eventually have way better customer acquisition. Currently, our website is approximately here. The planning and implementation took almost 1.5 years.
4. Really planned websites - For this category of websites, we need to consider all aspects to build a really good website. This has significant upfront cost but if for example, Nike wanted a website, this is how they would do it. We are doing one project for a Canadian company towards the lower end of this.

After choosing the required platform you will think how it’s all done? It is really very important to keep right people on the right project tasks, leading to the most successful outcome.

Our strong website design team is comprised of all roles defined below—

1. Marketer: Someone who has an effective understanding of customer behaviour and buying paths for a particular product. For example; Men's socks or underwear are mostly bought by Women etc.
2. UX designer: Workflows, Graphics design etc.
3. HTML developer: Someone who converts design into HTML. They need intrinsic knowledge of coding, standards, and techniques.
4. PHP developer: For implementing template.
5. Copywriter: For writing well edited and unique content.
6. Translators: Required for multi-language support.
7. Project coordinator: Project manager coordinates and communicates the day-to-day tactical implementation of the website project.
8. System admin: Installation, security, configuration. Most cheaper companies do this by letting developers install this via FTP. Poor choice. Developers don’t know and don’t understand server security.

A successful e-commerce website development takes teamwork. Good-skilled people will generally find clever & innovative ways to get maximum bang for your buck. A high-quality website can hugely enhance customer acquisition for your business. So in order to create a successful website keep yourself ready with these important points.