brick

How websites can benefit from our love of building

9 June 2021

Custom Development

They say that Flemish people are born with a brick in the stomach – we just love building! This urge to build and renovate can also be applied to tackle your website. After all, a smooth digital experience is a business differentiator nowadays, with websites playing an important role as they are frequently visited touchpoints. There are a variety of strategies for building a new website or improving an existing one, from a prefab platform to a custom renovation or a mixture of the two.

From turnkey to renovation, or something in between

Everyone has their own preferences when it comes to their home, depending on their taste, their own skills and their budget. If you have plenty of money to spend and you prefer to leave the (thinking) work to someone else, you can go for a luxurious villa that is handed over ready to occupy. In website terms, this is referred to as a Digital Experience Platform. On delivery, all the ready-to-use components can be used straight away to streamline all the information about your products or services. For a turnkey project, the lines are usually set out, and you can color them in. If that covers all the options you need, it's perfect. This is also the case if a website is built on an existing digital platform: you can do your own thing within the context and the options offered by the platform.

Others prefer to renovate their existing home – often because their budget is not (yet) very substantial, because they have specific ideas, or because they want to keep their current home, but update it. This is comparable to custom development. Craftsmen make changes or additions based on the owner's needs and taste.

Custom development can also be useful for new builds. If you want to add an extra bell or whistle that fits in the overall concept, it's best to call in the customizers. Web developers do this in such a way that afterwards, you cannot see the joins.

construction

A developer doesn't fire their own bricks

For many, customized development has a negative sound. It may not be supported, it might be insecure, and it can be totally dependent on the person who built it. Here, too, the building image is a useful way to refute this. A well-designed website will use well-known frameworks or libraries. After all, a constructor doesn't fire their own bricks. All the standards are complied with, so that someone else can work on it as well.

In addition, custom development provides many other benefits. Only the things that are needed are built, so nothing can break down in an abandoned corner of your website. Sometimes made-to-measure is also the only solution for niche problems or when things need to move fast. Think, for example, of A/B testing that goes beyond changing the position of a button. These are tests that really help to map out the ideal user experience. By not always fully integrating each version into the DXP system, adjustments can be made much faster.

Try to look at the bigger picture

A well-built house is important, but to make the entire experience exceptional, many other aspects are also crucial. The pipes and cables need to be properly connected to the utilities (integration), the postman needs a visible house number (findability), an alarm system needs to provide a safe feeling (security), a camera keeps track of all those who visit (analytics), and so on.

Some things are fundamental features, but just as an interior design often evolves from IKEA furniture to more robust versions, a website can also start small and evolve towards a fully developed environment as time goes on. Comfort and luxury is something you can work towards gradually. The most important thing is that you love to live there, and your customers love to visit you!

Do you sometimes think "help, my website administrator is a DIY handyman"?

Our skilled experts will be happy to help you think through the construction plans for your new website or the upcoming renovation work.

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