‘It comes in any colour you like, as long as that colour is black’ – Henry Ford
While the first cars to roll off the Ford assembly line were red, green, blue, and grey, Henry Ford infamously changed Ford production policy from 1914 to 1926 to only produce black cars. Black paint was cheaper and more durable, and since cars were such a novelty at the time, they didn’t really have to care about catering to individual tastes.
Assembly Lines in ‘Economy’ Web Development
‘Any colour as long as it’s black’ is the epitome of the ‘Assembly Line Mentality’: Provide the lowest possible costs by developing a product that’s as accessible and generic as possible, so as to appeal to the widest customer base. Then mass-produce that product to make up for low costs through high volume.
This is the basic principle behind many of the ‘Do It Yourself’ web services such as SquareSpace and Wix, as well as many ‘do-it-for-cheap’ services such as Fiverr. They develop templates that are generic enough to suit a massive swath of clientele, and simple enough for users to plug in their business name and publish it on the net.
In other words, you can have any website you want, as long as it’s their template.
Assembly Lines are Bad News in Web Development
There’s a reason the above video is a joke: Nobody wants to be mediocre.
The purpose of a website is to reflect your unique business, get visitors excited about your product, and reinforce your branding. It’s the first point of contact that many potential customers will have with you. As such, you want it to be completely unique, highly personalized, and most importantly, completely memorable.
An ‘Assembly Line’ website isn’t meant to be unique or personalized and, as such, the site itself becomes unmemorable. After all, when you make something that looks like everything, it becomes nothing.
Assembly Lines’ Damage Beyond the Paint Job
It’s not just individuality that’s sacrificed with these services: There’s an entire world of mechanical workings that are vital to the success, including SEO and content strategy. For a business website to obtain optimal rates of success, they require a skilled hand to set them up to be readable by search engines, optimized to achieve search rankings, and carefully managed to build and maintain authority.
In other words, “Any colour you like, as long as that colour is black” is a poisonous mentality when it comes to your business website.
To learn more about how Worldsites Toronto Inc. can help you make a unique, effective website, we invite you to contact us today.
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