You already know you need a website. Now the question is what to do next. As an entrepreneur or business starting your online existence, you have three basic paths to follow. Let’s look at each of them separately.
Path 1: Taking a shortcut and looking for low costs
The first way to build your own company website is a ready template. There may be times when you are lucky and find a free template for a simple and clean website design. Website for free? Sounds like a dream? Many of our customer started this way, but quickly reached a brick wall. A ready-made template, no matter how pretty, brings limitations quickly. What are they? First of all, you have no control over it. There is not much you can do apart from changing colours, photos, and text.
Advantages of the finished template:
- quick implementation,
- low cost,
- you don’t need a team.
Disadvantages of the finished template:
- a repeatable project – there are hundreds of them on the market,
- difficulty in matching the template to the needs (colours, fonts, page layout),
- a slow website, overloaded with features that you do not use.
When is it worth considering developing a website using a template?
When you just want to be present on the Internet and need a very simple business card. The time for more complex projects will come as you get your first customers.
Path 2: From scratch and with a technological approach
The second scenario is to build from scratch without relying on ready-made components. With the involvement of a skilled developer, you will likely end up with a light, fast website developed according to the art and devoid of all redundant elements. Sounds good.
Creating a website and a content management system in Python, Ruby or Java is a common case of technology companies we work with. Because if your company earns money by writing applications, it’s a bit of a shame to have a WordPress or Joomla website, right?
The thing is, if you are inexperienced, writing a website from scratch is like reinventing the wheel. It is a venture that consumes a lot of energy and costs even more nerves when, after implementation, it turns out that you have not thought everything through. Again, adding the smallest change takes days instead of minutes.
Advantages of building from scratch:
- efficient and fast website without unnecessary code,
- the possibility of creating an original website design, tailored to the nature of the company.
Disadvantages of building from scratch:
- long-term process of building a proprietary CMS,
- implementation requiring a budget of several hundred thousand EUR,
- it’s hard to get things right the first time,
- strongly engages marketing and programmers.
When should you consider building a corporate website and CMS from scratch?
When you are a global brand with its own marketing and programming department, and you have a sufficiently large budget to build your own application or system.
Path 3: On a finished engine, but with an individual design
Finally, there is a third way that combines the two approaches described. This is the way of Wise People, in which we take the best from a ready-made CMS system, which we know from scratch, and from an individual project that will make your website stand out from the competition. This is how best website design is made.
Why WordPress above everything else?
We consider ourselves WordPress experts, and our customers are very comfortable with this system, because they can edit content themselves in a convenient tool that they know very well.
Even the New York Times and Beyonce have a WordPress-based site, so it’s definitely not embarrassing.
In most cases, the website is supposed to fulfill a business role.
It would be hard for a marketer, for example, to have problems adding new content or improving positioning. Very often a programmer who developed a website is already involved in another project and does not have time to make changes to the website. This applies in particular to matching the content of an article or a headline, because the latter looked better in the A/B tests. This is where dynamic action is needed, and such opportunities are provided by WordPress.
Advantages of developing a website on WordPress:
- original website design, tailored to the nature of the company,
- verified and updated technology,
- numerous integrations with marketing systems, payment gateways and others,
- ease of adding new pages and creating language versions.
Disadvantages of developing a website on WordPress:
- the need to take serious care of security,
- extensive admin panel which may be cumbersome for beginners,
- numerous plugins – you need to have knowledge to choose the best solution.
When should you develop a company website on WordPress and with an individual project?
When the template is no longer enough and the website built by developers requires constant changes.
Which method to choose?
As you can see, a lot depends on what you are building the new website for. Are you entering new markets? Are you planning to refresh your image? Do you want to quickly and efficiently add new subpages without involving programmers?
If your website does not allow you to make free modifications and conduct analytics, it’s time for a change.
