Top 5 Reasons to Choose an Out of the Box Website

First of all, you might be thinking, what is an out of the box website? Well, we explain that on our out of the box website page.

An out of the box website is a fantastic option for most small businesses to create an amazing website that looks good, works nicely, gives them a great online presence that they own and generates leads and sales for their business.

You may be wondering why you would choose an out of the box website rather than going down the route of getting someone to create your website for you. There are many reasons and here are some of them…

1. You learn to understand your website if you use an out of the box website

A website is never finished. There will always be changes you want to make, pages you want to add, images you want to update or offers you want to promote as you come up with new ideas and your business develops and grows.

These things are easy to do if you have gone through the learning process at the beginning while creating your website, often with the support of some tutorials that come with your package. But if someone created your website for you, maybe handed it over with minimal training or no training at all then every time a change is needed it’s going to be a frustrating and time consuming process of trying to working things out or waiting for someone else to do it for you.

2. Design and functionality options are flexible.

If you’re using a good out of the box website there tends to be a lot of choice when it comes to the layout of your website and what your website can do. A lot of solutions will have pre-designed layouts or templates you can use, ecommerce compatibility, major email marketing system integration and easily connect to popular calendar booking systems. Basically everything you need for your website to be a really useful tool for your business.

3. They come with ongoing support.

This links back to the first reason. You will be continuing to work on your website for as long as you have it and so you want to know there’s support there the whole time in case you forget how to do something or something goes wrong. You may never need that support once you get the hang of everything but when it’s your business that will be affected if something does go wrong, then you want that security.

4. Web Hosting tends to be included.

This is one of the really nice things about out of the box website solutions, all the things you don’t want to have to worry about or don’t even understand, like web hosting and even email hosting with some packages, are taken care of so you don’t have to think about it.

5. Price

Out of the box website options tend to be cheaper than getting a bespoke website, especially if you have to keep going back for changes and support and paying each time. If you need something really clever from a functionality perspective or you have some very specific design ideas then you may have to go down the bespoke route but you might also find that you can start with an out of the box website solution and ask the web developer who created it if they can add to it for you, this becomes infinitely more cost effective.

All Out of the Box Website Solutions are Slightly Different

It’s important to do your research to choose the right solution for you and your business and we would recommend you look for certain things when choosing:

• Create a list of design elements and functionality you need on your website now and what you can envisage needing in the future and make sure you choose a solution that ticks all of the things on your list. You don’t want to create a website and then realise a year down the line that you want to add something and you can’t.
• Choosing an option where you fully own the website, can do external backups and could take it and host it elsewhere if needed is sensible. This is maybe just our belts and braces approach but you never know when something might happen to the business who has created your website and when it’s so valuable to your business, it makes sense to have these bases covered.
• Consider costs for the whole life of your website. As much as out of the box website solutions are cheaper than going bespoke, if you’re paying monthly or annually for the entire life of your website you do need to consider the costs. Some options are much more expensive than others and you need to weigh up whether you’re going to use everything you’re paying for. Also, there are a lot out there that are all using the same tech underneath but are charging very different prices. Some of these also claim they’ve created the system themselves which they haven’t, so just be careful. Reputable web developers will always be open about the tech their solution is sitting on.

So, now you know why we think you should choose an out of the box website and what to look out for or consider when choosing yours, you can check out our out of the box website offering here.

Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash