Custom Web Design
Creating a new website for your business can be daunting and expensive, so you might want to take shortcuts to make the process easier and faster; whether that will hurt your business is debatable.
You must remember that creating your website isn’t the end goal, but converting people from your website and increasing your sales is. For that, you need a customized website with all the features you need to take your customers on a smooth journey towards the conversion page.
In today’s article, we discuss the power of custom Web Design compared to website template designs.
To start, let’s define Web Design
UX Web Design Definition
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defines user experience as:
“A person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service.”
— ISO 9241-210, Ergonomics of human-system interaction—Part 210: Human-centered design for interactive systems.”
There are two sides to custom web design: one is to achieve the business objectives, and the other is to give the users a seamless experience that helps them reach their website browsing goals.
User-centric web design approach
The Interaction Design Foundation states, “The user-centered design process involves understanding users and their contexts, identifying user pain points and needs, designing solutions to address those needs, and evaluating the solutions to ensure they meet users’ requirements.”
If you pay close attention to all the successful and renowned websites like Apple and Google, they put the user at the center of everything they do because, without the user, their businesses would collapse.
This is why our UX Designers always take a user-centric approach to designing our clients’ websites.
The user-centric approach plays to each business’s target audience, ensuring that the website is designed to showcase the features interactively and intuitively to the user, making their journey across the website more accessible, faster, and more memorable.
Intuitive Design
So far, we’ve mentioned this term quite a bit, but does it mean exactly?
An intuitive design is one made to reference the users’ experience and background, thus using cues to guide them throughout the website journey naturally; however, this will be intuitive only to your target audience as different audiences with different backgrounds might not pick up the cues and thus the website would take longer to navigate.
By utilizing intuitive design, we can create websites that are user-friendly and easy to navigate.
Web Design Process
Each UX Designer is different; however, they all follow a variation of the 5-step design thinking process:
- Empathize (through user research)
- Define (through data analysis and synthesis)
- Ideate (through brainstorming)
- Prototype (using analog and digital tools)
- Test (with real users)
In general, UX designers perform a variety of tasks, but their typical duties include:
- Understanding users by conducting research and creating personas.
- Designing the user experience by creating wireframes and interactive prototypes.
- Testing and validating their designs ensures they are easy to use and meet user needs.
A designer’s specific tasks can vary depending on the organization and the project. For example, some designers may focus on particular areas of the user experience, such as usability, accessibility, or information architecture. Others may be involved in the entire product/solution development process, from ideation to launch.
Custom Web Design vs. Web Design Templates
Control the user journey:
When you customize your UX website design, you can easily create specific user journeys that you can control and edit according to your users, thus ensuring maximum usability.
However, when you use website design templates, you are stuck with a rigid user journey that isn’t customizable to your business or the user. This rigidity in design harms your user experience and, eventually, your website conversion rate.
Enhance functionality
Utilizing a custom web design allows you to improve your website functionality, add more features, refine previous features, listen to your users, and fulfill their feature requirements, leading to an elevated user experience.
With a rigid website template, You can’t improve your website functionality.
Converts better
A custom web design is made with the user and business in mind; that’s why user research and solid briefing are fundamental because, based on those, the designer can create a website journey that converts the users easily; you can always come back and tweak the user journey to amplify the conversion rate.
A study of over 400 companies discovered a correlation between funds spent on design and higher sales percentages, so companies who invested more in design had a higher conversion.
Optimizing the conversion rate with a web design template is nearly impossible as the template comes with its static user journey, so you won’t have much room for a high conversion rate or space to improve.
Reduces development time
UXMatters states, “Investing in good UX design can reduce development time by up to 55%. Thus, engaging UX designers on a project reduces costs and shortens the overall development cycle.”
Scalability over time
With time, your business will likely expand, provide more products or services, have new partners, locations, etc.
This means that your website needs to be scalable to mirror your business growth to your target audience.
This is only possible if you use a custom web design that can be scaled with your business. Web design templates won’t give you the freedom to scale your business over time, and they’ll always require more time to try and scale them but never really nail it.
Support team availability
You’ll always have a ready support team to help you with any queries or edits when you choose to custom-design and develop your website. However, with a website design template, you will require a lot of support, and you won’t easily find it available since there isn’t a dedicated team for your website.
SEO
Numerous website templates are usually built with outdated code, making them not SEO-friendly as they don’t follow the latest SEO practices.
However, with custom-built websites, the code is up to date and made with SEO best practices, so its chances of being indexed and ranked on search engines like Google are very high!
Security
Custom Web Design is more secure than website design templates as you can customize it to include specific security features that are standardized for your business type.
On the other hand, unless maintained and updated, website templates will have fragile security that can be hacked, tanking your user experience and trust.
Branding
Finally, and probably the most obvious perk, is that with custom web design, you’ll be able to fully integrate your brand into the website, creating a branded user experience that’s unique and memorable.
Achieving that is difficult with rigid website templates that limit your freedom to infuse your brand identity into the website.
Website Design Templates have their pros as well, such as:
- Ready website design
- No development skills needed
- Easy to apply content on
However, their pros don’t hide their cons; that’s why we always recommend custom web designs to our clients.
Web Design In Egypt
Having a mediocre website is not enough in today’s world. You need a web design that reflects your brand identity and website content that resonates with your target audience. Your website should be captivating and memorable. That’s why you need professional help to create such a website.
At Road 9 Media, we are dedicated to delivering modern and innovative web designs to our clients. We excel at building reliable websites and designing them in a way that showcases the brand with elevated design concepts that are functional and aesthetically pleasing. Our team of creative web designers has years of experience and expertise in designing high-profile websites for reputable entities. Combining such experience with innovative thinking results in a successful outcome that meets your requirements.
How much does it cost to design a website in Egypt?
The cost for a standard, single language, corporate web design in Egypt can vary between 50,000EGP to 130,000EGP from reputed web design houses.
Anywhere below that, you risk getting a website that doesn’t fulfill your business needs.
If you want to know how to choose a web design company in Egypt, check out this article.
How much does an eCommerce website cost in Egypt?
The cost for medium to large online shops fluctuates in the Egyptian market, starting from 80,000 EGP and can escalate up to 800,000 EGP. This price range is influenced by factors such as the portfolio of the web or mobile app developing company portfolio, the platforms to be covered (Web, IOS & Android), and the complexity of the eCommerce functions.
While more affordable alternatives are available, they may only be suitable for retailers or platforms that handle a small volume of products and/or monthly orders due to their reliability concerns.
To sum it up, custom web design is the way to go if you want to create a high-quality, user-centric website!
