WordPress is the undisputed king of content management systems, and it comes with a lot of great features out of the box. But what about when you want something tailored to your own needs, so that it looks and functions exactly as you want it to?
Many business owners start out with a theme based website, which is perfectly fine and we provide this for the vast majority of our projects as it reduces costs for our clients.
But in many projects, at some point the features provided by WordPress or the theme simply don’t cut it anymore, and this is where custom development is required. If you don’t have the right developer working on your site, they may not even know how to write code (many so-called “developers” are really just slapping together sites in a couple of hours without knowing much more than the layperson).
Here are the main reasons business owners look for custom features with their sites:
- They don’t want a cookie cutter website: When you are in business, you want a website that reflects your brand, and doesn’t look exactly like thousands of other websites in existence. This can be quite difficult to achieve when you’re searching for the right theme to fit your brand. You need to alter the theme, and if you don’t understand coding you end up stuck with a website that you are not completely happy with for your business. There’s nothing wrong with using a theme (in fact, it has many benefits) but it’s important that it’s customised to fit your brand and vision.
- Some themes are not easy to customise: With some of the WordPress themes available, you can’t even change the colour of the fonts, and your other design options are quite limited as well. These themes are not always easy to customise and if you keep paying a developer to make custom changes, you might as well have a custom designed website (or paid for a better theme) in the first place.
- They’re missing a key feature: While lots of themes have a great set of features, there’s no “one size fits all”. At certain times, the client will want to be able to do something that simply isn’t supported, and here’s where your developer can step in to write the custom code.
- Performance is lacking: While themes are often packed with features, where they can be let down is speed and reliability. Not only that, but when you’re trying to add new features or install extra plugins, this can cause a significant lag on website loading times. Often it’s better to write one custom plugin that provides a range of features rather than install half a dozen “off the shelf” plugins and try to get them to work together.
For more information on custom website development, call us for a chat on (07) 3333 2932 or request a free quote online.
