For a company building an official website, there are basically three paths: use a visual website-building platform, build it yourself with a traditional CMS, or hire a team for custom development. None of the three is absolutely superior or inferior; the difference lies in the type of investment, the degree of control, and the cost structure of later maintenance.
Visual Website-Building Platforms
Their characteristics are a low barrier to entry, fast launch, and monthly payment. Design is done through drag and drop, no coding is required, and content changes are also made by the company itself. They suit scenarios with limited budgets, the need for fast launch, and frequent content updates.
The trade-off is limited freedom. Page structure, interactions, and data ownership are all within the platform's framework, and deep customization capability is limited; if used long term, renewal costs keep accumulating, and the data is usually not entirely under your own control. In other words, what you save is upfront investment, and what you get in return is long-term dependence.
Traditional CMS
The advantages of open-source CMS are flexibility, being free, and extensibility; plugins and themes can cover most needs. Companies with a technical team can obtain a fully controllable site at relatively low cost.
The problem lies in maintenance. The CMS itself needs continuous updates, there is a risk of conflicts between plugins, the server requires security hardening, and when failures occur, someone must be able to diagnose them. These hidden costs are often underestimated. Companies without stable technical resources that use a CMS often end up, after six months to a year, in a state where they cannot change it and are afraid to touch it.
Custom Development
Custom development suits scenarios with clear and special requirements: high brand demands, unique data or business logic, or the need to integrate with internal systems. It has the highest ceiling, but also the greatest investment, a long development cycle, and any later adjustments require the original developer's involvement.
Whether to customize depends on whether these special requirements are worth several times the budget and time. In many cases, what companies think are special requirements can actually be met by combining existing solutions.
How to Choose
A practical order of judgment is: first see whether there are non-standardized requirements, then see whether there is technical capacity for ongoing maintenance, and finally look at how the budget is distributed over time. Each of the three paths has clear boundaries of applicability; choosing the wrong direction has a greater impact than choosing expensive or cheap.