Custom website development

What is a custom website?

A custom website is one that is not built by a no-code tool such as WordPress or Webflow. Instead, we think of your website as a modular interface built by gluing together several reusable blocks.

These blocks could consist of anything; a hero section, for example, or a list of testimonials, a list of blog articles, or an interactive map. Basically, anything you could imagine on a website could be a block.

As part of our web development services, we code the user interface and logic of these blocks from scratch, and make them available for you on the headless CMS. This means you can build as many pages as you want by dragging and dropping blocks and filling them with content.

After this stage, you have full control of the website and will no longer need to depend on developers to make changes for you.

Flexibility and durability

When you use a no-code tool, you're bound to the features and plugins that the tool provides. For example, if you want to integrate your form submission with a HubSpot CRM, the tool you're using needs to support that by default. If it doesn't, you're in trouble and you'd have to pick another tool to completely rebuild it.

The advantage of starting with a custom website is the total absence of any limits. Any API integration you have in mind is by default possible.

Moreover, it opens the opportunity to have complex interactive elements on your website since you have full control over the code.

Because custom websites are completely flexible, it makes them more durable, regardless of any feature or integration you decide to add at any point.

For example, when we built Zego's custom website, we only had the design of a few landing pages and built blocks according to that. When we wanted to add interactive forms later on, it took us just half a day to build another block type that allowed marketers to add forms that could automatically interact with Zego's backend APIs to store data. Once that was done, the marketers could use it in any page.

Ease of content management

Because your website content and structure is decoupled from the frontend code, the content management experience is unbeatable.

All you have to do is write the content, and it will automatically result in a good-looking custom website page that is fast and optimized to rank on Google.

Not having to recreate UI or worry about the color or spacing every time you create or edit a page is a huge time saver.

To make it possible for you to have such a setup, Tinloof uses Sanity, the number 1 ranked headless CMS in the market according to G2.

We also include a guide in Sanity to make it easy to onboard anyone to your setup and the integrations it has.

Consistent design across the website

The headless CMS setup makes it so that the design of your custom website blocks is implemented once in the form of a design system and becomes scalable enough to support any content you feed it.

After that, all pages are created by just writing content, making it impossible to break the design consistency of your website.

Unbeatable performance

No-code tools or traditional CMSs such as WordPress or Webflow generate the frontend code automatically for you. It's difficult to do that and achieve the same performance when you are not using a code that is specifically created for your website, and optimized to serve your content in the fastest possible way.

This is what makes custom websites much faster than any website built by a no-code tool.

SEO benefits

Because custom websites are fast, it already provides a huge advantage when ranking on SERPs (search engine result pages).

Moreover, when you decouple content and structure from the website code, it becomes much easier to automatically optimize the SEO of your website.

Add to that the fact that the headless CMS we use, Sanity, is completely customizable, we're able to provide out-of-the-box all the necessary features that increase your chances to rank - a key part of our technical seo services.

These features include automatic and real-time sitemap generation, redirects, and key SEO fields that are automatically validated based on best practices.

Localization can't get easier

There are different ways to internationalize a website. Sometimes you have all your content in one main language and you want to translate it into other languages. Sometimes you want to publish content that is targeted to specific languages or countries.

The advantage of having a custom website managed by a headless CMS is the flexibility you get when deciding on what workflow works best for you.

A great example of this is ExaktHealth, which publishes content bi-weekly, and that content has to be translated into 3 languages. We were able to make it possible to achieve that by integrating Sanity headless CMS with SmartCat in order to translate their content in 3 clicks.

Pricing

A common myth is that creating custom websites is more expensive than using a CMS such as WordPress or Webflow.

One thing to consider is that no-code tools are subscriptions that scale with your usage. Most no-code tools have a pricing model that includes a flat fee in addition to a price that scales based on the number of pages you create, the number of languages you want to translate to, or the plugins you want to use.

When you build a custom website, you pay a fixed fee for the development and then you have the freedom to only pay when you want new features. You will also eventually pay per storage or bandwidth, but the quota is much more generous since the only purpose of a headless CMS is to store your content.

Think of it this way: using a no-code tool is like renting a house, and building a custom website is like building and owning your own house.