Everyone is aware of the need to have an online presence. More and more companies are striving to offer the best online service and simplify their clients’ lives, thereby reducing calls, emails, or internal procedures. User areas and personalized content delivery are becoming commonplace. But, for better or worse, every company or brand is unique, and generic CMS platforms often fail to address their specific needs. This is where custom development comes in.
What is custom web development?
Web development isn’t just about adapting our website’s colors to our brand. We can consider custom web development as a personalized extension of our CRM’s standard functions. At Cactus, we have several examples of this:
- Embaling is an e-commerce site that synchronizes its products, prices, stock, and orders with its ERP. Additionally, each contact form creates a potential client in their ERP.
- Area Cooling Solutions has selection software developed by Cactus that allows searching for their products based on input parameters and a series of complex mathematical calculations.
These functionalities are not developed by default in CMS platforms like WordPress. It’s clear that there cannot be a plugin that calculates the cooling level of a compressor. If we want this functionality, we must develop it custom.
Is custom development worth it?
A well-thought-out custom development that truly adds value to both the brand and the end-user is definitely worth it. It will help us stand out from our competitors, offer an extra service, and provide added value that will tip the scales in favor of our brand.
If our custom development is operational—meaning it adds extra value to our purchasing or contracting process (product/service filtering system, advanced searches, user area…)—it will help boost online sales and become a significant advertising focus. Today, the selection software for Area Cooling Solutions is among the top 5 most visited pages on their website.
On the other hand, if our custom development is administrative—meaning it facilitates the management of orders, logistics, returns…—it will help us optimize our company’s resources, allowing our workers to focus on what is truly important and not be constantly “distracted” by inquiries or administrative processes that clients themselves can perform online. The productivity of Embaling workers has increased considerably since they no longer have to worry about updating the website.
But custom programming is for large companies… Or is it?
At Cactus, we always view these statements with great skepticism. After carrying out hundreds of custom developments, we can affirm that large and medium-sized companies, as well as small freelancers, have benefited from these practices.
How to create a good development plan
It is essential to take certain steps into account when developing custom functionalities. Here is a list of our recommendations:
- Have clear objectives: it seems logical, but often the objective(s) we want to achieve are not kept in mind. This will determine the type of development we want to do and how to approach it.
- Have a clear operation, that is, have a clear funnel: what path the data will take, how it will be managed, who is in charge of what (if more than one technology is involved), and how to translate it into code.
- Anticipate and minimize possible exceptions: one of the most complicated things about custom design is anticipating possible exceptions we might encounter. We always recommend reducing them as much as possible; our code will be cleaner and clearer, and therefore easier to scale (expand/improve in the future). The more exceptions, the more obstacles in the way and the more complex the programming will be.
- Dividing the project into different phases is really useful. It will allow us to reach goals sooner, be able to measure our progress, and be able to rectify or improve along the way.
- Have an experienced partner: it is essential, from our point of view, to have a partner who can truly perform the tasks we need. Otherwise, we run the risk of building on the wrong foundations, complex and convoluted programming (spaghetti code), or excessive use of plugins (which is very common).
At Cactus, we are experts in custom development for WordPress and WooCommerce, the most widely used web and e-commerce CMS platforms. If you are thinking about a custom development, contact us and we will advise you without obligation.
This type of custom development is precisely what we offer in our web programming service.
