Now we get to a rather technical aspect to your planning stage which might require the assistance of your website designer and that is whether you should get a custom website design or a template based website design.

Let's discuss these two types of websites further...

Custom-made Website Design

A custom-made website is developed from scratch by your web designer. You can dictate exactly what the site should look like, what kind of features it should have and how it should perform.
This provides you with an enormous amount of flexibility, but the downsides are that the site can become extremely complex and expensive, and may take a long time to complete.

Template Website Design

A template website, on the other hand, is essentially a website design that has already been pre-built (or at least the important bits have) and all it needs is your content, such as text, images and so on to complete it.
This means that it is very quick to put your site together from start to finish, and considerably cheaper than a custom website.

There are all kinds of new variations to the template website, some with content management systems included at incredibly low prices, and often a site is offered free, provided you sign up for other long term packages.

Because template sites are mass produced, they have an inherent element of "tackiness" to them. They are very generic and limited in their design and technical architecture, and are often unable to provide you with the flexibility that you might require, should you wish to add on future features and functionality.

Making a choice

This is where your budget plays its biggest role in your decision as to what type of website design and company to choose.

If you have limited budget and would rather spend more money on marketing and building up your company, a template website design might very well be the perfect start for you.

If it is important that you have the flexibility you require from the word go, and you know that a custom-made website design would be more suited to communicating with your target market, and you have the budget required, then a custom-made website design would suit you better.

Remember that there is no reason to go all out from the beginning. We would recommend that you make the smallest steps possible without compromising on quality. This way you will learn what is best for you, your company and your customers, and you can always grow and add on from there.

Click Next to move onto the next lesson - DIY vs. Professional