What Is Bespoke Web Design

I taught myself to code on a Commodore 64 when I was about ten years old and one of the first things I built was a game inspired by Scramble, the side scrolling shooter, and I remember the feeling of getting it working was genuinely magical. That was over forty years ago and I have been building digital products ever since, through my first IT business, through twenty years at the agency I co-founded with two friends that was eventually acquired by Interpublic Group, and now at Ronins where we work with founders and enterprise teams from our base in London and Surrey.

In all that time the word bespoke has been misused more than almost any other word in this industry. What a lot of agencies are actually doing is buying a generic template, swapping in the client’s brand elements and colours and calling it custom web design. That is not bespoke website design, that is template customisation and the difference is considerable and more than most people realise until they end up living with the consequences.

A genuinely custom website is specifically designed and built from nothing for your business. The CMS is configured around how your site needs to be managed and your editing experience is created just for you. The front end reflects how your target audience thinks and searches and buys and every component exists because the web designers understood the problem before they started designing the solution.

Early in my career I used to lead with the technology as that was my training and background. But over time I realised that nobody buys a database, they buy what it does and the same is true for websites. Nobody needs a bespoke website, they need a site that works the way their business generates sales and leads and that their team can run without calling a developer every time they want to update the content. This is what separates a truly bespoke website from a generic template from an off the shelf market-place.

I remember when I was first introduced to Orbus Software project by a friend looks for a job there and we both looked at their site in the cafe numerous times and could not work out what the hell they did as the sites content was very technical and not easy to understand if your on the outside. Then when we pitched to replace their website our audit uncovered that the site was on Sitefinity with rigid page templates and an overwhelming number of layout options in the content management system. There were no guidelines and no documentation so every member of their content team was using it differently. 

I have also been on the other side of this as a customer too as earlier in my career I was Head of IT at the ISTD and Jon the Head of marketing and I had to create their first ever website, do we use a template or go for a custom design after all it was our first site for them.

I am not saying a template website is always the wrong call. For a small business that needs to get business online quickly and the budget is tight, a good template with someone who knows what they are doing can work fine and I have told people that to their face. But if someone is charging you for bespoke web development and what you are getting is a theme with your logo on it then that is a conversation worth having before you sign anything.

Most of what I see is when clients come to us with an off the shelf design that they have outgrown as someone bought a WordPress theme for fifty quid, and an agency customised it, sometime quite heavily to it cant be the core theme can no longer be upgraded and called it bespoke. But the underlying code is still someone else’s. We build our own bespoke WordPress themes from either our library of ACF blocks and customise the UI or design something completely unique from scratch for the client based on their budget at the time.

The version we build is slightly different because from the design system to the components, the CMS configuration and the client specific user journey all start from a blank canvas and are shaped around business needs and ambitions This obviously takes a little longer and it costs more and I will be honest about that in a later section, but it is also the reason our clients can run their sites themselves and its relevant for years, one of our clients still has the same site we custom designed for them 10 years ago and its holding its own.

I get asked this a lot by clients and my answer is sometimes not what people expect because I have been known to tell them not to go for a bespoke build. If they are a startup with a tight budget and a simple proposition and you just need to be visible while you work out if the idea has legs then a template based site is fine, I did exactly this when I started Ronins as a solo founder. I wanted to get online, test the market, learn what our customers actually want and go custom when I had market fit. 

But that is not most of the people who find us.

Most of the websites that I see that are underperforming are not ugly and they are not broken but there are tired and not bringing in the leads it once did or simply the company had rebranded and the website needs a refresh.

This is when the upfront cost of a bespoke site make sense because you are not just paying for a new website you are paying for business goals and something that grows alongside you.

I reminder Brightside who came to us, they are an IT services company and they wanted something that did not feel corporate, they needed warmth, a personality and a way of communicating to SMEs that IT can be a simple managed service. We performed some in depth research into who their ideal customer profile was and drafted a strategic approach for an engaging website that was designed to convert and be attractive to Google.

Another client CTFSI had a different problem, they build AI platforms for the financial sector and their technology is exceptional but their old site was awkward and hurting their chances for investment, We gave them a custom website design that made them look bigger then they were and would resonate with both their target audience and investor pitches.

So back to the key question of what is custom web design and is it worth it, this really depends on if you need your website to generate leads or selling products in an e-commerce store or you require bespoke features that need to handle workflow operations and integrate with third party systems. This is when we create a tailor made website just for you, so as your business grows and you want to add new features then having a bespoke site is worth the bespoke website cost.

I am not going to give you a six step process with a nice diagram because that is not how it works in practice. Every project is different and the process shapes itself around what we find when we start asking questions.

We always start with questions, lots of questions. I find that most clients come to us having already decided what they want built and half the time the brief is the problem not the solution. We had a private school come to us in Surrey asking for a new website and during the discovery we were going through their prospectus and found a phrase that the founder had written years ago without realising what he had. “The most exciting school in England.” Nobody had done anything with it. We used that to reshape the entire brand strategy and built everything around it and when we presented it back to him he stood up turned his back to the room and cried because we had captured his life’s work in a way he had never seen before. They did not need a bespoke design they needed someone to see what they already had.

That is what our discovery does and it is the part that most websites we come across seem to skip as everyone wants to see how it looks. I get it, designs are exciting and tangible and you can show them to your board. But if the strategy underneath is wrong then the design is just design and you will be redesigning it in a year.

The collaborative process we run is not complicated but it does require the client to engage as we need access to the people who understand the brand, the customers as well as the people who manage the content and the people who will be signing off the work. 

After discovery we move into user experience and user interface design before the development works begins. The people designing are highly experienced and understand what can be built in the content management system and whats fantasy. Jason our Creative Director has been with me for years and one thing I have instilled in him is to question everything, the brief, the client, our own process and push for better as that attitude runs through every bespoke build we do and the entire agency,

The web developers on our team write clean code without any redundant code from themes, plugins and frameworks. We have picked up enough projects from other agencies to know exactly the business impact from bloated code and heavily customised plugins or themes that can no longer be patched.If your platform can’t evolve, it’s already obsolete.

I am not going to give you a price list because a bespoke website cost depends on how so many factors and client specific features or functions.

But I know that is not that helpful if you are trying to work out whether your budget is enough, so I have put together some indicative fee ranges based on decades of experience and what we still deliver today.

When I was still running the agency we built before Ronins we did a project for a global consulting firm where we consolidated sixteen separate WordPress website from across the globe into one shared content management system with multilingual content, content editor workflows and a shared media library

The question that most clients want answered is whether the upfront cost is worth it compared to a cheaper templated solution and I understand why they ask and my answer is always yes something depends on it, such as product sales, lead generation or operational workflows between you and your customers and you can tinker with every element of the use journey without slowing down page speed and the user experience.

I always say to clients that I will never play games with your money and treat as if it was my own cash. If I think the budget does not match the ambition I will say so in the first conversation and help you find an alternative solution.

The easiest way to find out is to look at their other work is to goto their portfolio and open five or six of their client websites and if the layouts feel familiar and the structure is the same on most of them then they are recycling a theme regardless of what they are calling it. A genuinely bespoke web design project should look nothing like the last one they did as it should be built for a completely different business with different business goals and a different target audience.

Ask them what CMS they are recommending and why, as if the answer is the same for every client regardless of what the business needs then that tells you something. We often build on WordPress, Webflow, Sitefinity, Umbraco and custom software systems. A web design agency that only works on one platform is not necessarily a problem but if they cannot explain why that platform is right for your specific situation then the recommendation is about their comfort zone not your needs.

Also ask them about search engine optimisation, their track record in it and when it enters their overall delivery process. We structure every bespoke build so that the site is indexable to Google and the AI search engine LLMS from the moment it goes live to ensure your digital presence is found.

And finally ask them what happens after launch, do they provide support? do they monitor site performance? Do they help you iterate based on user behaviour data or do they hand over the site and move on. Its in the first few months after a site goes live are when you learn everything about what is working and what needs to change.

If the agency gets uncomfortable with any of those questions that tells you more than their pitch deck ever will.

If you have read all of this and you are still trying to work out where your project sits then the easiest thing to do is have a conversation. I can usually tell you within thirty minutes or so whether your budget and your ambition are in sync as I have been doing this for a long time.

Let’s talk