The psychology behind choosing the right creative direction

Creative services are now far more than just PSDs and wireframes. They have to map the digital assets with their respective goals, help the customer take a specific journey route to satisfy the conversion goals. It all starts with taking the right creative approach to creating the perfect site as visualized.

The creative approach can be going for an off-the-shelf theme or developing a custom design approach. But, how do you do decide on that? There is no standard approach to taking the right creative direction. Each business is unique and so does their requirements. Hence, one can jot down the factors that are to be considered while choosing the perfect site.

Factors to consider while choosing the creative approach

Cost - Budget is the first factor. Now, this can be just a creative project or it can be a part of overall site development. In both the cases, the budget for the creative process can affect the overall project size.

Development Time - The process should not be too long and time-consuming. The custom design approach is comparatively longer while compared to purchasing templates.

Creative flexibility - Designs are evolving. They have to evolve with respect to the new functionalities added to the site over the period. Custom design is more flexible and adheres to future modifications easily.

Scalability - The design should be scalable enough to handle the growing amount of work in the future. The number of integrations with external systems will increase with time and the architecture should pave way for the same. This is possible with both custom and readymade templates while you have to cautious in choosing the latter.

Resource skills - Choose the resource set with diverse skills. Creative designers, Business Analysts, Design experts, UX experts, a Quality analyst. Resource pool with the expert skill set and diversity is a half success.

Site requirements - Site requirements include the business requirements, functional requirements, compliance requirements and standards to follow. Working with an outcome-based model will help you fulfill these requirements

Business needs - Business specific needs can be as simple as branding to customization in regards to the local market you cater to. These needs can be static or dynamic and you need to consider them both.

Marketing needs - Some of the marketing aspects might not be relevant right now but they might be required in the future. Gamification, Loyalty points, Promotional coupons, pop up gift notifications are few examples of Marketing needs that need support with the UI UX side of the site.

Benefits of using an off-the-shelf theme

Off-the-shelf templates are ready to go items that require slight modifications to the existing. This reduces the time-to-market and helps you launch early.

Compared to the custom creative approach, buying a template online is cheap. This brings down the overall cost of the project.

One does not need a technical expert to implement a readymade theme. This cuts down the resource cost involved.

A purchased theme is beneficial for a Small business who do not require a high-end customization with the UI UX for the site.

Benefits of using a creative approach

Custom built themes are highly flexible. Since every line of code is written manually, there will be no overriding of the existing codes; rather we just modify the existing codes.

Due to the custom design nature, they are scalable in the future. You can build on the existing theme to create further functionalities in the future.

By discussing initially, the theme can be personalized for the brand in terms of the color codes, the font used, images etc.

This carries a lot of time, effort, and money. But, it yields a top-notch output that is best suited for large and complex platforms with diverse digital assets.