The Importance of Custom Website Design

Website design is an evolving field with tons of solutions for the do it yourself business owner. Many people, like myself, are interested in handling every aspect of their business. We tend to agree with the belief "if you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself." A custom website design is a great way to personally handle this task, and it has several advantages as well. 

Unfortunately, cut and paste web design software is used to create tons of websites with practically the exact same layout. The selection of themes and color schemes make it seem like you are receiving a one of a kind design template, but many others have selected the same options. I don't know about you, but I am not impressed when I come across these identical layouts in website after website, which appear to have been designed by the same person.

In addition, using automated website building software usually causes information to be stored in blocks, and used over and over again on multiple pages. In some instances, this will cause "duplicate content" to appear on various pages of your website. Duplicate content can diminish the Google page rank of one or both pages in which it is found. This can even cause your site(s) to be considered "spammy" or low ranking by various search engines.

There are several advantages to creating websites from scratch, or with minimal use of cut and paste software. HTML code along with CSS styling allows us full control of what appears in the browser window. Information and images can be formatted with a range of options including spacing around elements, size, colors and more. 

One CSS style sheet can control the way every page on a website is structured, and changes can be made easily to that one CSS file. 

Although writing content for each page separately is a time consuming job, for many small business owners with a specific product or service, this task is not so daunting. The benefits of creating unique content for each individual page on a company website are far more valuable than the cost of time it takes to write them. Fresh content is regarded highly by Google and other search engines. It shows thought, and implies the author is knowledgeable of the subject matter. These are some of the things which are known to keep visitors on a site longer, and result in more clicks. 

A unique layout is also a refreshing sight to someone who has seen the same look and feel on webpage after webpage, and is more likely to remember, return and recommend your original site to others.