We’re often asked by prospective clients as to why they should choose to have a custom WordPress theme over a free or paid Wordpress theme. Here is a short list of things we ask those clients to consider.
off-the-shelf
adjective [ before noun ]
used to describe a product that is available immediately and does not need to be specially made to suit a particular purpose:
You can purchase off-the-shelf software or have it customized to suit your needs.
adverb
If you have complex needs, we don't recommend that you buy software off the shelf.
Source: Cambridge Dictionary
Customized to your firm
It is a theme jungle out there and you can spend fruitless hours hunting for the perfect theme. You can purchase multiple themes, configure them and add in your content only to find the theme may look wonderful in the shop window but simply doesn’t suit your vision, goals, requirements and content.
An experienced custom WordPress theme designer starts by asking a lot of questions, doing research, analyzing data, putting together a strategy, organizing your content and working out priorities and key actions you want people to take… all before getting to the aesthetics.
Unlimited design options
A custom WordPress theme can be created to suit literally any design you want. There are no limitations for custom WordPress theme designers. Even better, they don’t start with pre-made boxes to put content in or have to force your content to fit certain patterns, like a paid theme does.
An original, unique design
How many websites have you been to that all feel and sound the same? Your eyes glaze over, you stop engaging with the content and leave. You quickly forget which site it was that you were visiting.
A custom WordPress theme will leave a memorable impression: no-one else will have the same design as your site.
Lightweight code with no bloat
Custom WordPress themes can be much more efficient in their code because they only build the features you need and use, rather than stuffing in all sorts of features to try and entice people to build them.
All these extra features can slow down your site. Ensuring your site loads quickly is important not only for your visitors' experience, but also for good search engine rankings.
And, these extras can make maintaining your WordPress website frustrating. Paid themes regularly have an overwhelming number of pages of options to hunt through to make simple changes. Custom WordPress themes can simplify and streamlineyour site’s maintenance work.
No lock-in
Some paid WordPress themes include features designed to make your life easier but introduce a lock-in factor which will make your site much more difficult to work with in the future for developers and could even cause you to accidentally lose content while attempting to update the theme.
Quality-assured code
Working with Skunkworks means you get good high quality code that you can trust. While you might not ever look at it, or understand it, a site which is built on good code will run smoothly and not cause you problems. Some paid themes are extremely buggy, have low quality or unsafe code (or even worse have malware purposefully built-in to them).
Supported directly by Skunkworks
Skunkworks will provide personal, rapid support and quickly fix any bugs. Paid theme support can be slow or non-existent – you’ll be waiting in a queue with many other paying customers. In many cases, paid theme developers don’t offer customization help or support for integrating the theme with other tools or plugins.