Website Design, Website Services, Wordpress
The Pros and Cons of a Pre-made Website Template vs a Custom Web Design
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The internet has helped businesses gain more traction and visibility than ever before, but in order to compete with the other companies on the web, your business needs a website that both looks professional and functions properly. It can be hard to decide whether you want to hire an agency to build you a custom web design or if you should use a pre-made template instead; there are pros and cons to each approach. This is the first of two articles discussing these pros and cons so that you can make an informed decision about which path to take.
Choosing Between Pre-Made Templates and Coding From Scratch
If you’re looking to save time and money, pre-made website templates are probably for you. These packages allow you to create your own custom designs without having to learn code or shell out money for a web design agency. That said, most templates don’t allow for much customization; what may have worked for someone else may not be a perfect fit for your business. For example, is that baby blue really going to draw in customers?
Creating Your Own Design
While it is takes less time and is easier to just throw money at a professional web design agency and have them handle everything, creating your own website design is actually a great way to save money. By doing it yourself, you can spend some time making sure every detail on your site is exactly how you want it. You’ll also have much more freedom when it comes to customizing everything from fonts to button sizes.
Customization in a Pre-Made Template
When you use a pre-made template like for your WordPress theme, there’s generally a decent amount of customization options available. You will be able to make cosmetic changes like choosing your own colors and fonts for your site. You’ll also be able to upload your business logo and pictures. The pages may come with pre-built templates as well that you can fill in with your images and text. Every template and theme builder has its own workflow and system, which can be easy or difficult to learn to use. This may make customizing your website template difficult, but it will be much easier than learning HTML, CSS, or JavaScript to code it all from scratch yourself.
Pre-Made Templates Can Be Easy to Use
Although it may take some time to find one that fits your company’s brand, you can usually pick up a pre-made template for free or for a small fee. Just remember to check out all of its features before choosing your template, as most templates offer at least some customization options. Many WordPress templates built today are overloaded with customization options. These templates are often designed by professional web design agencies, so you know they look good and work well. Be sure to read reviews about any template you download before downloading it!
Are Website Templates slow loading?
Every website template should be optimized to load quickly, unfortunately, those templates with the most features and available customization, will often also have the largest file size and require the most bandwidth to load. As you probably know, research has shown that visitors to your website will leave within seconds of loading the website, so if your website takes 10 seconds to load because it’s loading a lot of large files for your template, your visitors will be unlikely to stay.
Are there any other benefits?
Sometimes going with a pre-made template is just easier. If you don’t have experience in web design, or if your business doesn’t generate enough revenue to pay for someone else to make it for you, then going with a pre-made template might be your best bet. A lot of designs these days are mobile friendly, search engine optimized (for organic search results), and easily customizable.
Stay tuned for Part 2: Custom Web Design