Bespoke vs Themed Websites – how do you choose?

A few years ago, we made the decision at TLD to stop working on WordPress theme websites. This doesn’t mean we don’t work with WordPress – we do (and our programmers specialise in it) – it’s just that we don’t install themes - otherwise known as templates.

There are of course times when we feel sorry for a client who is stuck with a theme and wants some changes, and in those cases, our designers and coders work together to get things fixed for them. But the hassle that comes with this made us start to say "At TLD we specialise in what we call “bespoke designed WordPress websites”

Thie means we make the design "from scratch"

We take a brief and ask very good questions (to find out what the "unique greatness" is!)

We design layouts for each and every page, panel, popup and form. We present these creative designs to our clients, get feedback, adapt, and show again. When the designs are signed off, we brief our programmers (we call them coders) to make our designs come to life - ie make the designs work as websites to be viewed on mobile devices and PC browsers.

Our coders then do the HTML coding (this is the programming language understood by browsers) and they do the WordPress integration (WordPress is a system that allows you to have a website that you can update yourself.)

For those of you who have tried using WordPress templates you may have noticed they are rigid and inflexible. You cannot come to us and say “I want the design to look like this” because essentially you are choosing from a section of pre-designed, pre-built themes. It's the freedom to do what we really need to do that is the key advantage of bespoke designs.

Here are 3 questions to help you decide:

Do you have “like, literally no money”?

Obviously, that is always an extreme description, but we have heard the “zero budget” phrase thrown around before! The cost for a WordPress theme is usually anything from free to ￡100 pounds, on average, and then when you add in the cost for a programmer to put it together for you, it can take between 2-10 days on average, depending on your specifications.

This, multiplied by the day rate of your programmer, is what you can expect to pay for a theme site. It’s significantly less than the cost of a bespoke designed site – because with a bespoke designed site we are working on a site plan, a brief, unique designs, amendments on design, hand coding and custom Wordpress code. Many additional steps for that extra luxury of having the site exactly as you need.

Sometimes, “done is better than perfect” and you can choose a decent theme site as a stop gap, deal with the hassle and inflexibility and go off and make some money to reinvest in a bespoke site in future.

Are you really picky about the detail in design?

If so, you need to go for a bespoke designed site, with a talented design team with a proven track record.

If not, you can choose from a selection of pre-designed pre-built themes/templates, and just get a programmer to implement.

Do you want to create pages on your website which have a clear goal – to create an action in your website visitor?

In the world of SEO, we call these “landing pages” and we purposefully want these pages to be the pages people land on when they search for particular pages. With a bespoke designed site, we can design these pages to go through the exact hierarchy of information to take people through a journey and allow them to absorb information in a certain way. With pre-built themes/templates you have a lot less control on how the information is presented on these all important pages.

As we've said before - we arent here to bash "theme" websites – everything has a place in this world, and we have used themes for some of our clients before. Theme websites have advantages - for the most part:

1. They take less time (initially - if you're easy going about how you want things to be)
2. They cost less money (initially - if you don't try to adapt them too much)

But to us, we see them as a stopgap to the holy grail of bespoke designed websites.

Below is a series of facts for you really inquisitive people about bespoke designed sites - but if you prefer to just talk, I like that too - so just message/call me with any questions!

5 facts about bespoke designed websites:

1. You get a completely custom design

You are unique, your company is unique, you deserve a unique online presence to match that. When we do a bespoke website we take everything into consideration – branding, images, fonts, your key messages, tone of voice, and the personality that you want to express. You may find a theme that loosely represents who you are, with some of the elements customisable to an extent, but you still come out with a website that looks like a lot of other ones seen before. Kind of like wearing the same dress as someone else to a party – embarrassing!

2. Planning for functionality

A big thing to consider when deciding between a theme or a bespoke website is what functionality you would require. So many clients come to us with little awareness about all the big and small things they may require. Once we learn more, we can create the list of what’s needed – contact form, newsletter signup, gallery, payment gateway. With theme sites, there are plugins for so many of those things, but customisation is very limited. Bespoke websites are carefully planned, designed to your specific needs using only what you need and not cluttering the site with extras that slow things down. Bespoke designed custom made sites are specially coded to work for you and never against you.

3. Freedom to make changes easily

When it comes to pre-existing themes, unfortunately, they aren’t always made to be as easy to update as possible. There aren’t any strict rules on usability, and we find that the behind the scenes updatability can be counter intuitive, even if the theme is fairly well built and designed. Without getting technical, it requires a developer to rebuild the theme, and there is no guarantee that it will work. Want to make a change to a bespoke website – sure (!), we built it, we know the code, we can change that. Nothing broken!

4. You know you can contact the developer

Getting a bespoke website done through a reputable company means that the developers have been tried and tested, and that you will have the ability to have direct contact with the people building your site. Contacting the elusive theme developers can often be a tiresome job, they created the theme to be sold to hundreds, even thousands of people, who (if there’s a bug) will all experience it, and sometimes take a while to fix it. It tends to get difficult getting answers when you’re in a long queue.

5. More than just a website

We look at more than just websites when we work with clients. We consider how the website fits in with their overall marketing plans and goals, including your content marketing and social media. We think about what people need to feel and believe about you when they visit your website. You are unique, your company is unique, you should be represented in a unique way. The flexibility and freedom of bespoke website means we can tailor make each and every page to build trust, clearly inform, simplify concepts, and show personality – showing that YOU ARE SPECIAL!