Choosing The Right Web Design Solution

In today's digital landscape, selecting the ideal web design solution is a crucial decision. In Middle Tennessee proprietary options like Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly are often sought after due to their user-friendly interfaces and quick setup. However, it's essential to shed light on their limitations, as well as having a search engine-friendly website which is paramount for online success, especially when compared to semi and fully-custom alternatives.

Squarespace

Known for its aesthetic templates and ease of use, the result can be restrictive when it comes to customization unless you're well versed in writing code. But the appeal of this option is ease of use without having to know code. So I'm going out on a limb and suspecting that the business that is drawn to this can't do much - if any code. The predefined templates can limit your creative freedom and make it challenging to achieve a truly unique website. The solution has improved its SEO capabilities over the years, but still falls short in some areas. Users have less control over technical SEO aspects. You may face challenges if you decide to migrate your site to a different platform in the future. Squarespace proprietary sites are designed to be hosted on their platform and may not work correctly if hosted elsewhere.

Wix

Praised for its drag-and-drop builder and a wide array of templates, still poses limitations. Also consider the fact that the same templates being offered to you are being offered to any competitor that chooses this option. Your business is trying to separate from the pack. Using the same website template as your competitor doesn't accomplish that. While it's excellent for smaller, simpler websites, Wix can become cumbersome for larger, more complex projects. Customization options may be confined, and migrating away from Wix can be a complex task due to its proprietary coding. Wix has its share of SEO limitations. While it offers some basic SEO tools, the depth and flexibility of SEO optimization options are comparatively limited. This can hinder your ability to implement advanced Optimization strategies

They now have Wix Studio which is out with an option for web development agencies. It ostensibly offers a much more robust way to manage multiple projects, while still appealing to those who are adverse to learning how to write code. So unless you're a design agency or you're just dead set on using Wix, then you'll have to locate those agencies that will be using this platform.

Weebly

Often chosen for its simplicity and affordability, this comes at a cost. Advanced customization is notably limited, and the available design options may not fully align with your brand's vision. If you want to customize your website, you will need to have a working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. For businesses looking to scale and customize extensively, Weebly might not be the most suitable choice. While it provides fundamental SEO features like meta tags and alt text, it lacks more advanced SEO functionalities. Customization options are limited, making it challenging to optimize your website fully.

Custom Web Design Solution

On the other hand, semi-custom and fully-custom sites provide a tailored approach. WordPress, for example, falls under the semi-custom category, allowing a higher degree of customization compared to the aforementioned platforms. However, it still has its liabilities, particularly with the risk of having a website that looks similar to many others due to the widespread use of themes and plugins anyone on earth can purchase if you're trying to save on development and design. If you customize an "off-the-shelf" plugin for example, the changes would be overwritten with each update the original developer makes. Typically that could happen on a monthly basis - which would be a hassle and possibly costly because you have to add the customization back in each update. However, It is important to note - both themes and plugins can be custom built for your website from scratch thereby making them exclusive to your site creation and not resold to any one else.

A fully-custom approach is the pinnacle of tailored digital design. It involves building a website from the ground up, considering every unique aspect of your business uncovered during the discovery process. While it requires a more substantial investment, the result is a website that perfectly aligns with your brand, goals, and audience while giving you full access to do on-page website optimization to maximize your SEO efforts.

Additional Considerations

Your choice of a site creation should be based on a careful consideration of your specific needs, what the site visitor values, and future aspirations. While Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly offer ease and speed for the designer, they may fall short when it comes to extensive customization and scalability largely due to proprietary code and most likely the designer using these platforms has limited knowledge or very little interest in coding.

It's important to understand it is the source code that the Search Engines crawl to index and inevitably rank the page. This is also the instructions for the browser on how to render the page. If your website "breaks" and neither you or the designer can trouble shoot the code, how do you fix it?

The cost that an agency incurs from these monthly fees charged by these platforms are passed on to you plus the agency mark up. These commoditized solutions have a monthly ongoing fee to access their platform. Stop paying and you lose all that was created less your content.

The SEO options within these platforms were built by web developers who don't do SEO for a living. Whatever they've implemented was based on the scope and deliverables the project manager laid out based on their understanding of SEO. While It's not impossible to rank using the above solutions, implementing advanced Optimization strategies you get with the custom option, ensures your website is more competitively ranked in SERPs. If you're not ranking, what's the point?

Exploring more SEO-friendly alternatives is crucial if driving organic traffic and achieving online success is a goal. Semi and fully-custom options opens doors to limitless possibilities, ensuring your website stands out in a crowded digital space both aesthetically and functionally based on your desired outcomes and what your audience needs and values.

We can work with those in the US, obviously Middle TN - Nashville, Franklin, and Spring Hill. The added bonus is once you've paid for the custom design and development, the intellectual property of the code and finished site belongs to you. That's very important-it's exclusively yours. A custom design company that doesn't allow that should be a red flag.

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