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We offer a range of affordable and fully custom websites to suit your business’s needs.
7 minute read
Below we compare our custom eCommerce website offering with our affordable eCommerce package site (both leveraging WordPress and WooCommerce) so that you can make a more informed decision about which solution is best for your business.
Our eCommerce Package Website, also known as a ‘template website’, is the perfect cost-effective solution for ambitious businesses looking to launch a new online shop or bring their existing one up to the latest standards.
First off, while we may use the term template, we’re by no means suggesting our package websites use off-the-shelf themes or templates. They’re still websites that we’ve designed and developed in-house using all of our knowledge and expertise.
So while our eCommerce Package Website uses a general template, it’s still been created using the latest and best design and functionality we know works to create a successful online shop. The solution takes findings from the high performing custom eCommerce experiences we’ve created for our clients, as well as using references from established retailers such as Sports Direct.
Examples of websites we’ve created using this package include Lecenté, Grass Next Day, and Kent Hire.
In our experience, we’ve found certain key features required to create a high performing online shop. The eCommerce Package Website has been designed for the ‘generic shopper’, with clear navigation, prominent calls-to-action, a streamlined and established purchase process, and a mixture of imagery and content.
The eCommerce Package Website has been created using WooCommerce with WordPress – the most popular platform in the world for eCommerce businesses. We offer this in two tiers, Lite and Pro, and below, we’ve listed the features included, with those highlighted in bold limited to the Pro version.
Our fully custom website offering takes a more tailored approach to your business. They’re the next step up from the eCommerce Package Website, and they involve a more extensive discovery phase. We also start with a blank canvas, meaning that all of the key page layouts and templates are designed specifically for your business needs, considering your specific target audience and how you need to sell to them. We also fully tailor the WordPress and WooCommerce admin area to suit your specific content management needs. Our custom websites are for brands looking to take the next step in investing in their customer experience and brand image.
Examples of custom eCommerce sites we’ve built include Catchpole and Rye, Hopes Grove Nurseries, Walter Geering and Kent Invicta Chamber of Commerce. These sites went through our extensive six-stage process (unlike our pre-built packages and have only undergone four out of the six stages).
Discovery is the opportunity for our team to get to know your business, its needs, challenges, unique selling points, as well as who your competitors are and what they’re getting up to online.
This step allows us to leverage our expertise and our wide range of user experience research tools to find out what your customers are really looking for, their needs, pain points, and how the website can serve them. When building websites, decisions often get made based on assumptions. With our user research tasks, we aim to remove the risk associated with these assumptions. So, we gather real-world insights from your target audience so that you can implement user journeys that are properly tested and proven to convert. The tools we use can include:
We explore these activities in more detail and the importance of user experience via our blog.
Using the information we’ve collated during discovery and user testing, in this stage, we sprinkle the design magic to add colour, typography, photography and visual flair to bring your brand to life. To give you an idea, here are some of the tasks we carry out during this stage:
At this stage, our development team create a completely new WordPress admin area and WooCommerce gets integrated to create the online shop element. We strip out all of the standard themes and plugins to ensure maximum optimisation and customisation. We also completely customise the WordPress admin area to be just the way you want it – making it easy to use and tailored to your needs. This step can include:
Once the visual design phase is complete and the WordPress and WooCommerce admin has been built, it’s time for our talented in-house developers to start using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript to bring your designs to life. During this step, the team can cover the following:
The launch of your website is the last but most exciting stage of all. Once we’re 100% happy that the site is built to spec, ticks all of our boxes and performs to our high standards, we hand it over to you for final sign off. Once we’ve had your seal of approval, the launch is imminent, and then the site is yours.
If you’ve got the budget and you want a tailored website that specifically targets your core audience and gives your team access to an admin area that is easy to use and bespoke to them, then our custom website offering is the best option for you. While they might take longer, they’re tailored to your needs from start to finish and will give you a best-in-class solution.
If you’re a startup or have a limited budget and are looking for a site that will kick start your eCommerce business, then our package solution would be better for you. They’re scalable, quick to market, and ready-made using features and functions proven to deliver results.
Our friendly team of designers, developers and digital specialists are ready and waiting to help with your website project.
