If you and your business aren’t online, you’re not only losing a big chunk of the global market, but you might find yourself in a confusing space where people don’t believe you are a legitimate business. Yes, a website can be a good place to start, and there are many pre-made solutions that are amazing at helping you generate an outstanding online presence, but what if that isn’t enough? How do you even know which option to choose?

Some popular platforms for creating your own store or blog can get you online fast and cheap; some take the menial labor from project, content, and customer relationship management, but what if they can’t cover all necessary use cases? What if you just need more?

What are Pre-made Solutions Anyway?

If you’re looking to get online quickly, you’re bound to find pre-built software products that offer specific functionality, also known as pre-made solutions. Those solutions are designed to help a broad range of businesses.

If you’re looking for e-commerce platforms, you might find yourself looking at offers from Shopify, BigCommerce, or WooCommerce; if you’re starting a blog, platforms like WordPress or Blogger might be of interest; if you’re in need of a content management system, you might also be looking at Squarespace or Wix; and if your goal is to simplify your customer relationship management, you’re probably looking at systems like Salesforce, Zoho, or HubSpot, to name a few.

Some come with a one-time fee, but more often than not, you have to sign up for a monthly/yearly subscription to use their features.

What are Custom Solutions then?

This is where you can let your creativity flourish: with custom solutions, everything is built to meet your specific needs. You get a tailor-made website, an application that’s unique to your user flow, or a software platform that respects your business’ production style.

There are no limitations on functionality or design, so you get to improve productivity, streamline your operations, or enhance engagement with your customers, all while being on brand and authentically you.

What are the advantages of creating Custom Solutions?

1. Personalized User Experience

No matter the size of your intended product, you should always start with a good user experience. When you start creating a custom solution, you start with your customer at the center of the process. You discover their likes and dislikes, how they behave, and how your digital presence not only helps them use your products but also makes their lives easier.

With a custom UX, your company’s style and branding are a part of the digital experience, so you can always be sure that your visual efforts are continuously on brand. A good way to set yourself apart from your competitors, right?

If you’re interested in learning more about what UI and UX design is, how they differ, and why they’re a necessary part of the development process, make sure to read the following article.

2. Scalability

The goal of any business is to grow and improve. A custom solution can be developed with that intention in mind from the very beginning. Expansion should be a breeze, and when more and more customers join your ship, you can be ready to scale and serve them all because your developers set up a proper database when they first started the project. Go, backenders, go!

3. Integration with Existing Systems

Let’s imagine the following scenario: your marketing and sales teams already use a platform for their lead generation, reach out, or customer care, but now that you’re creating a brand new digital presence, all of their previous work has to be shifted somewhere else because your pre-made solution doesn’t offer that specific integration. In the end, you will have lost more money than you initially saved — it takes more man-hours to jump ship than it does to build a custom solution from scratch.

This is just one of the many examples where your new development team can take into account all your current tools and even future integration needs right from the get-go.

4. Flexibility

We’ve already mentioned personalized design, scalability, and integration. But what happens when your growing business suddenly needs to accommodate a new user base, or your overall business model and target goals change?

No problem!

Custom solutions are flexible in terms of design, functionality, and features, so you can add or subtract anything and everything, as long as it serves a higher purpose — meeting your end goals and making your customers happy.

Another point for competitive advantage!

5. Security

When you create a custom solution, you know exactly what kind of security you offer to your customers. You not only know how you’re protecting their personal data, but — by paying attention to compliance with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, or PIPEDA — you enhance your credibility and lower legal liabilities.

With special systems in place, you can also protect your business against cyber attacks; apart from being costly and damaging, they can even increase your product’s downtime and lower the productivity of your team.

Why Outsource Your Custom Solution to a Web Development Agency?

1. You get the expertise you need

If you hire a web development agency, you get an experienced team that can utilize its expertise and develop all the specific features your business needs. You get a devoted team of web developers, designers, and project managers all of whom are on a mission to create a high-quality product just for you.

2. Your product has a faster Time-to-Market

When choosing an agency, you’re choosing a cherry-picked team that’s been working together for a while. This well-oiled machine – one with a streamlined development process – becomes a huge asset to your company’s team. With all these resources at your disposal, your project can be developed quickly and efficiently, reducing the time it takes to get a product to market.

3. It’s Cost-Effective

Pre-made solutions, despite their appealing price tag, can come with unforeseen liabilities such as hiring new staff members for maintenance or an abnormal amount of costly integrations to meet your desired needs.

When you hire an outsourcing agency, you get a team that works with you from the very beginning; they will employ their previous experiences to predict your possible scalability and integration goals, but also put your users’ needs at the forefront.

This, in turn, will provide a better return on your investment in the long run.

4. You don’t have to worry about Quality Assurance (they do it for you)

Users are unforgiving. If your app loads too slowly, or they encounter a tedious bug while using your product, you can say goodbye to high user retention numbers. Luckily, a good development agency assures the quality of the products they deploy by hiring a Quality Assurance Engineer. Rigorous testing and debugging and flowing through all the possible and impossible flows are all part of this engineer’s responsibilities.

They ensure not only that the product is stable and performs as expected, but that you get the pristine quality you paid for.

5. Your product has timely support and continuous maintenance

Just because you’ve shipped your product and gained user traction doesn’t mean that your development process is over. Oh, nay, nay.

Issues will arise and they need to be addressed as soon as possible. Also, development processes evolve with each passing day, so from time to time, you have to make some updates just to keep up.

To reduce costs associated with maintaining an in-house development team, your agency can do all of that keeping up for you as part of your development package.

The bottom line

As tempting as their price tags are, pre-made solutions might not be suitable for your business and its needs. When you hire an outsourcing development agency, you get a team of experts that are by your side – they will provide you with their knowledge and experience, care and security, as well as develop the custom product your customers need quickly and efficiently.

We so happen to be a web development agency, so if you want your digital needs meet, hit our CEO up and schedule a meeting to talk about you and your business.