Living, Breathing Professional or “Off-The-Shelf” Theme? An Analysis

There are lots of ways you can build a website in 2018, many of which do not require humans. Drag n’ drop site builders are insentient, robotic and decidedly unfleshy; you can go from start to finish without speaking to anyone at all!

With hundreds of themes, millions of customers and adverts on every platform, it’s tempting to jump aboard the Squarespace, Weebly or Wix bandwagons. Ads like this make it look so easy, right? Right?!

Easy…A Bit Of A Shortcut

Sometimes, easy doesn’t cut it. Sometimes, there’s a suspicion that easy is a shortcut past thorough.

Getting a website built has become a non-issue. Building it well, that’s something else. I make the case that in the year 2018, the best thing to create your website is a human.

Whether you work with a lone developer, a creative couple or a big digital agency, it pays to be taken care of, especially when the website represents your source of income.

Websites Make The First Impression For You

In business, making a good first impression is crucial. Your handshake, your manner and your treatment of the customer are judged in seconds. In the realm of the physical, you control this meeting. On the web, you entrust it to your site.

Your website says hello to the customer. It guides them through your business. It walks them through your company history, outlines your philosophy and gives viewers a flavour of your services. If the meeting goes well, it drops the customer at the contact page, and they ping you a message.

Consider this: can the culmination of your business plan, target audience and market research be manifested in an off-the-shelf theme? Is your hunger for success honoured by an all-in-one ‘bundle’ with five customisable colours?

If the answer is yes, there are plenty of themes out there. Go robots!

If the answer is no, the chances are that your design does not yet exist. It needs a living, breathing creator to give it the spark of life. That spark is the imagination, experience and meticulous research we call design.

Precision Is Painstaking

A developer is like a tailor; they’ll make you a website that fits and functions correctly. They won’t needlessly bloat your pages with catchall scripts, nor will they allow you to upload massive images without considering the loading speed.

A bespoke website is the product of cognition. The maker – be that a person or agency – must consciously decide what to include or omit in the build. That kind of curation must be made on the back-end, something that’s mostly unachievable with rigid WYSIWYG editors.

A prepackaged theme gives you quick, likeable results. Its purpose is not to give others access and make pernickety SEO changes. Such access is forbidden. We don’t want experts getting where they shouldn’t! Lord knows we had enough of those last year.

A Developer’s Business Is Helping Businesses

A developer will make you a great website, on that I’m confident. Better still is when they provide vital peripheral services such as branding, marketing and content creation.

Remember, our day-to-day job revolves around helping other businesses take that leap online. In doing so, we’ll learn about your trade, your services and your competitors. We’ll research it, write about it and when we’re done, we’ll make a song and dance about it! It’s a personable kind of thoroughness that you can’t get from a cold, calculating machine.

I’m not saying all themes are terrible, or that they cannot be customised into suitable solutions. I’ve had a wonderful time with some themes and I look forward to more in 2018. However, if you wish to tick all the quality standards, address all the ranking factors and boast a truly unique product, you’ll need a human on your journey.