Templates assume a sales path you may not have
Most themes expect a blog, a shop, or a hero with three icons. A manufacturer quoting from project photos, or a clinic booking around staff hours, will spend the budget fighting those assumptions: plugins, extra pages, and CSS overrides that break on the next update.
Custom work starts from the action. Quote, book, call, or browse a catalogue. Navigation and page types follow that action. You still reuse internal components. You do not reuse a stranger’s information architecture.
Ownership after the invoice
Ask who can change copy, titles, and images without hiring the original designer. Theme lock-in often means a page builder the team is afraid to touch, or a developer ticket for a phone number.
A custom delivery should leave a limited, obvious editing path or a small admin panel. METEK builds those fields when the team will actually use them, not a CMS with every module switched on.
Search engines read the page, not the theme name
Templates ship with duplicated titles, thin service blocks, and crawl traps in tag archives. Cleaning that up is real work. Counting it as “SEO included” because a plugin is installed is not the same work.
Custom sites still need titles, headings, a sitemap, and crawlable links. The difference is those fields are designed into the templates you actually publish, instead of being fought after a theme update.
When a smaller custom site beats a large theme
Five unique pages that explain the offer and collect a complete inquiry will outperform a twenty-page theme the team cannot maintain. Cut the page list to the path that makes money. Add articles or extra markets when you have something to say.
A temporary landing page can stay on a simple stack. Trouble starts when that landing page is sold as the company’s permanent platform.
Compare proposals on the same list
Unique layouts versus theme, content ownership, redirects if you already have URLs, technical SEO fields, and who is accountable at handoff. Our pricing article explains why the number moves when those lines change.
If you want the custom path, describe the business and the visitor action. That is enough to see whether METEK is the right studio for the job.