In this digital age, school websites are the fastest way to disseminate important information, including admissions information, term dates, curriculum information, and student data. Your school undoubtedly needs one, but the kind of website you get is equally important as well. When asked, we always recommend getting a custom-built website over a proprietary one made with online building tools, and in this post, we aim to explain to you why.
A Custom-Built School Website vs a Proprietary School Website: What Is the Difference?
There are two ways you may choose to build your school website: either having a developer build it for you or building it yourself on a proprietary website builder platform.
Proprietary websites are popular because you can easily build one without needing to know how to code. A website builder platform offers you a set of templates that you can choose from and proprietary tools like editors, themes and other elements that you can use to customize your website to a degree. A user simply maintains a subscription to the builder platform for retained access, but the ownership of the site remains with the builder. Examples of Website builder platforms you may have heard of include Wix, Squarespace and Weebly.
Custom-built websites are either coded from scratch or designed on an open-source platform such as WordPress or Bootstrap by designers or developers, and you retain ownership while paying for hosting, domain name and other regular maintenance costs. Since there is a deeper level of design and code handling, custom websites are usually far more customized to suit specific user needs.
Why Do We Always Recommend a Custom-Built School Website?
You have more control over the costs incurred in keeping it running.
When you decide to use a proprietary builder platform to create your website, you remain subject to the pricing models of the platform itself. This takes away your financial control since you remain at the mercy of the platform. In the event of an unfavorable shift in pricing, it would be impossible to move your site at all. You risk the considerable loss of having to rebuild the site from scratch again elsewhere.
This isn’t the case with a custom website, where you handle the costs such as hosting, domain name purchases and more. If your host’s pricing is no longer attractive to you, switching servers is much easier.
You get a much higher degree of customization.
Proprietary website-building platforms often make it incredibly easy to get started; just pick a template and start filling in your information. This is all wonderfully convenient, but it becomes limiting when you have specific aspects of your school that would require heavy customization to be more efficient. For a school website, customization would be required for many elements including admissions, enrollment, student information and much more.
The beauty of custom-built websites is that they offer plenty of customization options. Built from scratch, the code can be directly altered to suit your school’s needs, no matter how specific. A highly customized website provides a richer user experience while allowing the uniqueness of your institution to be well-represented online.
You have more SEO Tools at your disposal.
One of the reasons why institutions have websites is to be able to reach more people, and first-page rankings on search engines help a great deal with that. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of utilizing certain tools to orient a website to place higher in search engine results. These practices often require customizations to a website’s backend, in some cases, specifically changing the code.
You can guess where we’re going with this. Proprietary website-building platforms don’t always offer much in the way of SEO. In fact, many report struggling to even rank on a search engine’s first page with proprietary builder websites. From caps on keyword implementation to the inability to directly alter sitemaps, custom websites easily sidestep all of these limitations. Custom-built websites can be optimized to rank better on search engines, making them much easier to find!
You have ownership over your school website.
We’ve discussed how a key feature of proprietary websites is that they are made on specific builder platforms. Part of the agreement when you sign up on a proprietary platform is that they own the site you eventually build. This is because they handle everything from hosting to the purchase of domain names. The opposite is true for custom-built websites. Everything is coded from scratch by developers, and you get to keep the domain name you purchase, no matter where you take your website.
Think of it as renting a house versus owning a home; one of these gives you more freedom and autonomy. Anything could happen with a proprietary website builder that could put you at risk of losing your website. Your custom website will always be yours, and you can take it with you to any server you wish. For a school website, ownership is always better than the risk of loss.
Conclusion
Considering the needs that come with running your school, it is absolutely worth it to get a custom website. Being able to tailor it to your specific administrative and communicative needs on top of completely controlling every aspect of it will always be beneficial in the long run.
Let us help you get started if you’re unsure where to begin. Our team will help you put together the kind of custom school website that encapsulates your school vision and provides the most optimal user experience on any device. It’s not enough to just get a school website. Invest in a quality site that does the job that it needs to do and simultaneously remains under your ownership and control.