Bespoke Website Design - An Overview

Bespoke website development refers to website builds that are unique custom builds, hand-crafted, or tailor-made for a specific use case. The analogy of a tailor-made suit is a good one. The drivers, motivations, and comparisons with off-the-shelf are similar. With a bespoke website development, the expectations are very different compared to a basic theme-based website. They occupy different ends of the investment spectrum - cheap and cheerful versus hand-crafted attention to detail.

Who is Bespoke Web Development For?

In some ways, there is a reverse pyramid. The larger the company, and the bigger the budget, married to a more established brand, and a website with significant traffic volumes lends itself well to a bespoke website design.

However, earlier-stage companies are also embracing bespoke website development to help them to stand out from the crowd but also to signal a level of sophistication or maturity. For technology companies who rely heavily on their website as a means to generate revenue, first impressions count and a cutting-edge website will represent a decent investment.

Here at Contento, for example, our website is a bespoke website build, as it enables us to create a well-designed and high-performant website to meet our needs. As a Headless Content Management System (CMS), we are taking advantage of our own underlying technology to ensure we’ve got a professional-looking website that delivers.

Off the Shelf - Theme-Based Web Development

The majority of websites are theme-based. Traditional CMS like WordPress are often paired with themes from the likes of Theme Forest to deliver an all-in-one solution. While there are several advantages to this approach (not least in terms of cost and time to deliver), templates tend to be quite constraining and designs often betray their origins as a cheap and cheerful solution. While this makes perfect sense for a starter website, it is not ideal for growing companies looking to scale and who aim to convey a sense of confidence and maturity. Many companies that start on a traditional CMS like WordPress have to endure a painful site migration off WordPress (often to Headless) downstream but the decision is often informed by budget constraints.

Like any custom build, corners are not being cut, as quality tends to trump speed. You may have specific requirements that you want met, and being constrained by a template is something that does not appeal.

With bespoke web development, you can also embrace composable architectures like Headless where you can marry cutting-edge technologies with a unique bespoke design leading to a high-quality outcome.

Pages can be individually sculpted to align with business objectives, and you can enjoy speed gains and enhanced SEO by virtue of it being free from the code of template-based all-in-one website builders. 

Additional benefits include enhanced UI/UX, the ability to focus on pixel-perfect design, and to optimize the website.

Like a bespoke suit, the main disadvantages tend to be cost and time to deliver.

A bespoke website needs a lot more specialist input compared to picking a theme or template and tweaking it. This specialist input will push the build costs up, and the high-touch experience also leads to extended timelines for delivery. However, much like a bespoke suit, these trade-offs are both understood and are baked into any client’s expectations when it comes to the route chosen. And for those clients looking for “best-in-class” this represents money well spent.

In recent years, Headless has emerged as a more modern approach to building and maintaining websites. The decoupled nature of the architecture means the design and content management are separated and linked via APIs. Hence the front-end design is usually bespoke - as you are not managing it via an all-in-one website builder.

Hence you get the advantages of a beautiful bespoke website with a high-performance back-end content repository powering it. Additional benefits include a more secure, scalable, and flexible architecture that can power blazingly quick websites.

Bespoke website developments are becoming an increasingly popular approach as greater numbers of websites look to stand out from the crowd, while also taking advantage of the latest cutting-edge technologies. In parallel, Headless CMS backed websites are also growing in popularity, and these are not constrained by templates and thus are a perfect match for a bespoke lead approach. The next phase in the evolution of Headless and bespoke website development, will be an increase in reusable components so new bespoke websites can avail of previous development work. The design will naturally still be unique, but all the laborious wiring that goes on under the hood is ripe for disruption.