How Template Websites Can Ruin Your Brand Positioning
To really recognise the major differences between what a custom website and template website can have on brand positioning, we must first understand what brand identity and brand design is and how it impacts your business.
What is Brand Positioning (In the simplest way possible)
By its basic definition, Brand Positioning is designing a company’s image, ideals and offerings in a way that holds a unique place in the mindset of the target market. At its core, Brand Positioning is what makes you different from your competitors, making you stand out to your customers. With effective brand positioning, an entity (retail, brand, wholesaler, etc.) is able to take preference in the consumer’s mind compared to other brands, which ideally results in higher loyalty and better sales conversions.
The Temptations of Template Websites
If you’ve ever played a game of “Where’s Wally”, you’ll understand how difficult it is to find exactly what you’re looking for in a crowd that more or less all look the same and blend together. Trying to stand out from your competitors while using a template website is similar, in the sense that you blend in with the crowd. The only real difference is that consumers won’t spend hours looking for you like they would in “Where’s Wally”, meaning you (Businesses) have to find them (Customers).
While template websites appear convenient and cost effective in select situations, they have major downfalls. They’re a generalist approach to Web Design, visually pleasing to a large crowd but never specific to a target audience. They tend to be extremely rigid in terms of design capabilities, meaning while businesses/Organizations may have a vivid idea of how they want to present themselves online, template websites, in many cases, won’t give their web designers and web developers the full capabilities needed to meet those ideas. Now we aren’t saying template websites should never be used, but they only tend to be effective or viable in very select situations. When forming a brand identity, you want the ability to freely construct your website to visually look different from your competitors. Templates by design are meant to be a drag and drop, no-design-needed solution and thus end up looking more or less the same as all of a business’s competitors.
The solution
With a custom website, you have the ability to create anything you like online, rather than being restricted to the arbitrary confinements template websites provide their users. In terms of brand positioning, you can create a powerful image in your consumers mind about the type of company you are and the offerings you have the moment they glance at your website. Users know automatically that your brand is what they’ve been looking for because you’ve specifically designed your website with that target market in mind, rather than a generalist approach of template based websites.
At Designpluz we believe that each brand is unique and deserves their own one of a kind look and feel when presenting themselves online. That is why we only do custom designed and developed websites, helping you stand out from the crowd online.
