Custom Site vs. Piknic: What To Choose And Why

01.29.2019

Since its inception in 2004, Blender Media has specialized in creating state-of-the-art custom websites for public companies. More recently, however, we introduced Piknic to the market, a solution for companies who still want high quality sites but don’t have the time or resources for a fully custom project. We’ve had some questions from our community about which option, a Piknic website or fully custom website, is best. Hopefully this post will help you decide the right path for your business. But first, a little history lesson…

How Blender Media evolved to create Piknic

Blender Media was founded on the desire to create high quality, engaging, and fully customized websites for public companies. We were truly passionate about offering clients in the IR world an opportunity to showcase stunning investor relations websites to their shareholders. However, the more we spoke with clients, the more we saw a gaping hole in the market for quicker turnaround, easy to use websites that didn’t compromise quality. Many companies, whether they were preparing to IPO, or simply revamping their existing website, needed a solution that wasn’t a giant customized project. While Blender still offers customized sites for those who need them, we also created Piknic as a solution for those companies who still want stunning, impactful websites but have limited resources.

What is Piknic?

Piknic is an affordable solution that offers high quality, ready-to-use websites that can be purchased and launched in under 5 weeks. Every Piknic template is strategically designed for IR by our award-winning team of designers, so you can be confident that you’re getting the best design in the industry. To keep inventory fresh, the Piknic team also retires each template after eight purchases so you can offer a unique experience to your investors. Finally, we didn’t just create beautiful designs on the front end. Every Piknic website is also powered by the BlenderCMS, a content management system built specifically for investors relations, and includes access to our amazing Blender Updates team.

The roster of industries that the designs cater to are Cannabis, Healthcare, Fintech, Startups, Mining and so many others, as our line of templates continue to expand in volume and elevated in design.

Should I use a Piknic template or am I ready for a customized website?

Your choice of website path is completely up to your goals as a company. It’s important to think not just in the short term, but also in the long term for what your company wants to accomplish with an IR website. Here are a few questions to ask yourself or your team that will help align your company with either a Piknic site, or a fully customized website:

  1. What does your timeline look like for a website?
  2. Do you have a certain budget that you need to keep?
  3. How large is your corporation? What is your industry?
  4. What type of digital presence does your company already have? Are you looking for more brand awareness? Do you need help getting found in the market?
  5. What type of design are you looking for? Are you comfortable with a pre-built best-practices design that you can easily change and add on to? Or do you want to go with something 100% from scratch?
  6. Does your website have any unique requirements in order to best convey your story to stakeholders?

Note: It’s important to remember that both Piknic websites and fully custom designs by Blender guarantee you’ll get the highest quality work from an award-winning agency.

If you’re still undecided on which is right for you, we’ve highlighted a few differences below:

Piknic: Premium ready-to-use websites

If you decide to go the Piknic route, here’s what you can expect. You’ll first get access to a full library of corporate website designs to choose from (we’re also adding new designs all the time!). Because most Piknic templates are designed and develop ahead of time, we make sure to keep the planning, deliberation, and decision-making to a minimum. This saves you time, and makes the website creation process smoother and easy to manage. If keeping your website project timeline within weeks instead of within months is a huge factor for you, Piknic is probably the way to go.

Even though you’re picking a pre-built template at the beginning, Piknic also offers tons of add-ons and customization tools to make sure your website is as unique as your company. Including interactive elements, a customized landing page and placeholder site, analytics packages, and much more.

Custom Design: Focusing on your long-term growth and amplification

If you have the time and money to pull out all the stops, Blender can deliver notable customized websites for your company that will not only wow investors, but also stand up to the digital age. With a Blender customized website, you’ll get a full team of strategists working with you to incorporate crucial communication strategies for prospective investors including marketing, advertising, and branding for your company.

Your website is the face of your brand, and is often the first place investors will go to get information about your company. The tone of your site, your mission, values, latest numbers, project photos, and layout can all be influencing factors for investors. As your partners for a fully custom website, we put our efforts into learning what is trending, what has evolved in technology, and what type of interactivity makes for a better user experience. We share all the data with you, and then apply it directly to your brand.

To put it plainly, a customized website would be the best option if your company is ready to strengthen its identity, amplify growth, and leave the strongest mark possible on the online space.

Both Piknic and customized sites have full support from our help desk

Our amazing support team works around the clock to help our clients with any website changes, best practice questions, digital consultation, and training on how to use the BlenderCMS.

Regardless of whether or not you decide to choose the Piknic path or a fully customized website, the level of support remains the best in the industry. We’re your partners through this no matter what, and we want you to feel confident making changes to your site and asking questions. We can’t wait to work with you!

Interested in exploring the option of either a Piknic site or custom website? We’d be happy to chat about which route fits you best. Contact us at [email protected] to talk with a digital expert today.

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Contact us at

[email protected]

to talk with a digital expert today.