When customers arrive at your website, it brings satisfied smiles to their faces. They see that it’s everything they hoped for and more. It’s easy to find, easy to navigate, pleasing to look at, and everything is set up exactly how they like it to be.
Or, at least, that’s what you want your customers to think about your website. But, unfortunately, your customers may be having a much less satisfying experience on your current website.
They can’t find it on Google. If they do find it, it appears so generic that they wonder if they’re in the right place. And it doesn’t matter anyway because they can’t find anything they’re looking for.
But don’t worry. We have the solution: custom web design.
You want your website customers to have the user experience we described in the first example, right? A custom website can give them that. Keep reading to learn how custom web design improves user experience.
It’s not that we doubt your ability to soup up a free template into a functional website. But “functional” equates to “decent-enough,” AKA, “barely-passable.” Is that really the highest aim you have for your business?
A generic website means a mediocre user experience. That’s not nearly good enough to achieve your business goals. Not if you’re serious about having a website for business, that is.
Fortunately for you, professional web designers are user experience experts. They’ll build you a unique website that provides the best user experience for your customers.
And that means better conversion rates for you. A recent study found that improving user experience on your site can increase your conversion rates to 400%!
And you’re an expert, too. You know everything about your business: your message, your goals, your customers/target demographics, etc. Together, and only together, you can combine both of your skill sets and craft the perfect website for you and your customers.
Here are the top ten user experience benefits your customers get from a professionally-designed, custom website.
There are almost 2 billion websites on the internet right now. So what makes yours so special?
Your site visitors are no strangers to the internet. They’ve most likely seen hundreds of sites before visiting yours.
They’ve seen the good, the bad, and the just plain boring that the internet has to offer. And when the first set eyes on yours, they’ll automatically measure it against all the others they’ve seen. So, how will yours measure up?
On average, if you have a template site, the general visitor opinion falls somewhere between, “It’s ok,” and, “I’ve seen a million sites just like this.” And they’re right.
If you can create a site from that template you chose, then so can anyone else. And if you liked it enough to choose it, there’s a good chance that thousands of others have, too.
So basically, when you create a template site, you’re literally choosing to make your site look exactly the same as thousands of others, on purpose. It makes your site and, therefore, your company, look generic.
But a custom site is one-of-a-kind, every time. You’re guaranteed a design that’s unlike any your visitors have seen before. This gives visitors a refreshing user experience instead of a frustrating one.
This refreshing user experience is also reassuring for your visitors.
A generic template site is unprofessional-looking. It makes visitors wonder if they’re in the right place.
But a custom site is uniquely “you.” Expert site designers will create a design that reflects the look, feel, and voice of your specific brand. If you’re a well-established brand in your own right, your customers will recognize right away that it’s definitely your website they’ve arrived at.
Your custom site looks professional and reinforces your brand. This gives visitors peace of mind about using it, and about doing business with you.
This is something you can’t do with a template. With a template site, you’re literally copying and pasting someone else’s website. It’s 100% impossible to make a site “your own” when it’s the same design as thousands of other sites.
This is one of the best parts about getting a custom website from professional designers. You get to work with them to build the perfect site for your business and your customers. A big part of what makes your custom site so unique is your input.
With your input, the web design experts you hire will design your site with your specific customer base/target demographics in mind. Your visitors get a site that’s tailor-made just for them. There’s no better user experience your customers could ask for than one that’s designed specifically for them.
Your website is the central hub where your company interacts with your public online. It’s a public face for your company and an online guest home for your customers.
A template site appears to your public as if carelessly plucked off an assembly line. And if you took no care in designing their online guest home, clearly you don’t care that much for them.
A custom site shows you care enough about your public to make them something special. And that’s good since 68% of your customers will leave your company if they feel you don’t care about them.
It also humanizes your online brand. As stated above, it effectively expresses your company’s personal voice instead of a generic one. The unique design of your custom site gives your online presence some personality.
This is essential to your business because people prefer to do business with actual humans. They don’t like doing business with a faceless company and their robotic-sounding website.
There’s nothing better for your SEO (search engine optimization) than having your site designed by SEO experts. All the best optimization techniques for boosting your search rank are built right into your site from the get-go.
And that’s good since, presumably, you’re not an expert in web design or SEO. If you were, you’d be doing that instead of running your company.
That said, creating a template site leaves all the designing and the optimizing of your site up to you. Your search rank depends entirely on your efforts to optimize a template that wasn’t specially designed for any particular purpose or company.
Conversely, your custom site is expressly designed to put your specific company at the top of the search results.
A professional web designer knows the best way to set up site navigation for optimum user experience. And you know your optimum target customer and what they’ll be looking for.
Together, you’ll create the best site possible for helping your customers find what they’re looking for. Your site visitors will be highly satisfied, which should result in a higher conversion rate for you.
It’s also set up to make communication easy. You’ll use custom design to include whatever communication method works best for your visitors, such as live chat or a chatbot. And your intuitive site setup will make these tools easy for your visitors to find.
Ease of navigation does more than help your site visitors find what they’re looking for. It also helps them find what you want them to see.
Professional web designers can set up the site to ensure visitors see any message you’re trying to convey. This includes calls to action. Whether it’s sales, subscriptions, or shares you’re after, a custom design can be intentionally set up to get the message across and boost your success.
The main selling point of template sites is their boast of being “easier and cheaper” than designing a custom site. But, in fact, neither of these are true.
Building a template site means taking a template that wasn’t made for you and tweaking, tweaking, tweaking. You keep chipping away at it over and over hoping to, one day, optimize for your purposes a site that was never designed for you in the first place. Does that really sound easier to you?
Also, this not-well-laid-at-all plan ends up just like you’d expect. The site never quite fits your company right and doesn’t do a great job meeting your goals.
Why would it? It was never designed to. And then, who cares if it’s free if it doesn’t increase sales or do you any good whatsoever?
But a custom site is set up for your company’s success from the start.
For your site visitors, this means fewer changes and updates. This makes for a much less chaotic user experience than a template site you’re constantly changing.
Again, when you create your own template website, you’re on your own. If you mess up somewhere along the line, don’t expect your site visitors to be understanding about it.
This isn’t that unlikely of a scenario, either. All your incessant template tweaking is bound to cause problems somewhere along the line. And all your visitors know is that they’re sick of your glitchy, unreliable site.
Don’t expect anyone to help you, either. When you create your own website, the only support you have is you.
But experienced web designers have the expert skills to build your custom site without such problems. Plus, they’ll teach you all the important things to know about how to update it yourself.
You can also make sure before you hire them that their work is guaranteed in some way. That way, if they do build you a glitchy site, they’re only a phone call away from promptly fixing the issue.
Remember how we said your web designer will teach you how to update your site? That’s because your custom site is designed to be expanded and improved upon. With your input, your web designers will know the goals you have for your site’s future and will design for them.
When your site does require updates, it will only be necessary improvements on an already excellent site, not jarring design tweaks every couple of days. These are the types of updates your visitors will actually be glad about.
As you can see, the benefits of a custom website speak for themselves. Without question, custom web design will improve user experience on your site. So, if you haven’t already, start looking into getting your own custom website and boost your UX.
Now, read 7 Signs You Need a Website Redesign.
