Sometimes. But most often, no.

The importance of custom web design comes down to how much value you personally place — not how much your clients or your customers place — on a custom design and how good the designer is. Most of your customers don’t care about either.

Here’s why:

Your customers don’t care

For most businesses, clients and customers are more interested in solving their own problems — as they should be — than evaluating how nice your website looks. (Unless your business is actually being a web designer. Then you should probably put some time into it…)

Over the past several years, I spent over $25,000 dollars on two website redesigns for Ambler. I naively expected that the redesigns would make a difference to our web traffic and to our sales. In reality it made no difference whatsoever except becoming a drain on our bank account and eliciting a few “nice site” comments.

Custom web design has its place to be sure. But it’s totally unnecessary from a pure profit-and-loss business perspective until a company is quite large or has a very unique brand. The reality is that unless the business has grown to be a multi-million dollar company, customers and clients don’t know the difference between custom or generic web design. Even then, they may not notice the difference.

Especially when companies are small and starting out, the last thing they should pay for is custom web design. Great design can be had for almost nothing through themes and templates, and marketing dollars can be better spent on traditional or online advertising like Adwords.

Most "designers" aren’t designers

Let’s face it. Plenty of “web designers” aren’t very good at what they do. If they were, the Internet would look a lot less like a neon garage sale.

Great designers do exist. But they also know what they can charge, and those fees just aren’t feasible for a small business. Only when a small company has become a large successful business are custom design fees reasonable relative to all other expenses.

It’s not black magic anymore

Building websites used to be inextricably linked with writing code. Similar to car owners and their mechanics, if you had a website, you were dependent on someone else to create and maintain it.

Now, design and development are separate processes, and the designs can be had for next to nothing through themes and templates that include the underlying code. It’s possible to have a decent website without being dependent on a designer or developer to make any changes.

To that end, plenty of professional web designers have changed their business model and are building quality themes instead of custom designs. They’re selling them cheap or on a subscription basis.

What about SEO?

Yes, yes, SEO… These days, SEO (search engine optimization) has little to do with adding keywords to a website. It’s important, but it takes about 30 seconds to add some keywords to your meta tags.

More important for search than having keywords in your code is having a website that is web-standards-compliant — as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium, not as defined by Microsoft. Thankfully, frameworks like WordPress (which is free) are built for standards right out of the box.

So what does custom design offer?

Performance-wise, there’s nothing to be gained by custom design. Good SEO and page speed can be had for virtually nothing these days. Don’t let anyone try and convince you of anything different.

However, custom design does offer two things: a unique, all-your-own digital fingerprint on the web, and a warm fuzzy feeling the first time you see it.

If the designers are willing to spend enough time with you to understand your business — and if you’re willing to spend the significant funds that doing a good design job will require — then they should be able to build you a beautiful website that you’ll be happy with for a few years. (…if you can make changes on the fly, which will most certainly come up.)

Just remember that you’ll be more excited about it than your clients will be, because, again, customers are rightfully more concerned with solving their own problems than with how good you look.

The bottom line

Good design is important. Custom design is not.

I’m going to go out on a limb and beg you not to create an original design. There are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely there’s one that you can start with? Not a site to rip-off, but an inspiration. Fonts and colors and layout. The line spacing. The interactions. Why not? Your car isn’t unique, and your house might not be either.

[Find] something that both appeals to your target audience and has been tested and tweaked and works. Pick a reasonably small but successful site in a totally different line of work.

~ Seth Godin, “How to create a good enough website“

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