When deciding on a website what technology should it be based on?

We look at custom, bespoke and template development approaches.
Often people do not understand the different technology options when they come to commission a website. This can cause misunderstandings and costly mistakes further down the line. It is important to understand what’s being proposed and how to differentiate between the offers.
What approach is best for you depends on your budget, and your requirements. This determines how effective a website you get for your money, but also how quickly it is likely to get out of date, and how easy (and costly) is it to maintain and update. This article is based upon the needs of a small business with limited budget, and limited experience of technology.

There are three fundamental technology options, here’s an explanation and the relative merits.

The bespoke software development approach.
This involves writing code specifically for your project. For a variety of reasons only use a well established software company. They will have a mix of analysts, coders and testers to work on your project. They should follow a formal development approach of requirements analysis, software coding and testing before releasing it to you for acceptance.

The challenge with this approach is that if you are small business it is probably way beyond your budget. A typical cheap developer will be charged at £750 a day, an Analyst £1200 a day! And you do not get much code from a day’s work. You are unlikely to get much change from £10,000 for a small project. But this is the only way if what you want has elements of functionality unique to your business. Be aware that the costs do not stop once it’s been developed. There are likely to be "design errors" and it will be inevitable that you will want amendments made if only to ensure the website is up to date with the current browser and platform technologies.

The Custom development approach.
This approach uses pre-defined software designed specifically for a purpose such as eCommerce websites, or content management information websites. Often very functionally rich, if it is open source, then it would have probably been used in thousands of websites so it is proven technology and low cost. This approach is “custom” in that the developers are taking it “off the shelf” and customising it to suit your requirements, including bespoke graphic design and search engine optimisation.

This approach is fantastic value for money, because you get proven technology, with lots of functionality, which if it had been developed in a bespoke manner especially for you would have cost tens and tens of thousands of pounds. In addition it is likely to be less prone to software bugs because it has been widely used and any on-going additional functionality and updates you may want are likely to be very cheap.

The disadvantage of this approach is if you require functionality which not available “off the shelf” then you would need costly bespoke development.
An ideal example of this approach is in eCommerce websites. The functionality required is well known, and has been deployed in millions of websites, so no small company would dream of a bespoke approach because of the cost. Some of our customers are businesses who used to have an old bespoke eCommerce website, that has probably cost them close to £20,000 in development costs over a couple of years. They found it costly to ask their developers to add the new functionality needed to keep up to date with new websites.

So they ask us to provide a much more powerful, easier and cheaper to maintain “custom” website for a few thousand pounds.

The challenge a buyer has is to be able to differentiate between the different vendors of such systems, some can be very cheap and not very effective.

The Template Development Approach
This is really just the cheaper version of a “Custom” approach, often costing only a few hundred’s of pounds. Because of the low cost, you do not get much of a service, probably a set layout and choice of colours and style, and do not expect much in the way of careful search engine optimisation.

This may be ok if you want to self-build an Information website or possibly a content management website and you need to keep your costs down. But this cheap approach is a waste of money for eCommerce websites.

The reason for that is that eCommerce websites need to be competitive, i.e. to appear in the top 10 of query results, often against two hundred thousand plus other web pages. And when they get visitors the shopping experience needs to be highly efficient. The typical lack of advanced search engine optimisation and eCommerce functionality results in poor visitor numbers and sales.

Since the lost sales revenue will be high, it is a much better investment to go for the custom approach with a company who has retail experience and will take care to get your search engine optimisation right.