Template or No Template? What You Need to Know About Web Design
Posted on 17. Feb, 2010 by Matthew Toren in Design, Websites
Your site is your handshake. It’s the first impression many of your clients will have of your company. If your site looks sloppy, amateurish, or unprofessional, people assume your business is sloppy, amateurish, and unprofessional. For most entrepreneurs, this is not big news. We know the importance of our web presence. What many may not know is how to have a great site without spending a fortune with designers and developers. If your website’s functionality is your business – like with membership or gaming sites – you might not have much choice. On the other hand, if you use your website as a way to present your business, products, and services to the world and don’t require advanced development, you might want to consider web templates.
It used to be that a template site could be spotted a mile away. These days, templates are more sophisticated, and the sheer number of template designs available makes it possible for you to create a site that’s unique, individual, and far from cookie-cutter. In fact, for as little as $50.00, you can even get a full flash site, at template sites like FlashMint.com. Another template provider, Allwebco Design, has some of the coolest non-flash site designs out there for around $120, as well as some good information for the newbie website creator.
FlashMint.com
Allwebcodesign.com
Words of Wisdom
The design of your website is not something to be taken lightly, and there are some things to look out for when choosing a template provider. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Free is a relative term. If you’re really bootstrapping it and looking for a free template design, there are plenty of sites where you can find good looking templates at no cost. Just be sure the site you choose isn’t more trouble than it’s worth. Open Source Web Design (OSWD.org) boasts 2,080 free template designs. Take some time in choosing one though. OSWD has three important features to look at. First, users give designs star ratings; secondly, people are able to comment on the designs; and last, they show the number of times a template has been downloaded. Look through the comments. You’ll find that many are just commenting on the look of the design, which is less helpful than those commenting on its functionality. The comments you want to look for are those, for example, telling you that the design looks great in IE7 but not so good in Firefox, or that the tables only line up at certain screen resolutions. You’ll want to be sure your chosen design hasn’t been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times too. You might still be unique within your industry, but the fewer downloads, the less chance you have of looking just like someone else.
OSWD.com
- Expect to support yourself. Don’t expect any technical support when choosing a free template. For the most part, they aren’t difficult to implement, but you’ll want to have at least a basic understanding of HTML, or know someone who does and can help you if you get stuck. Even sites where you pay for a template are notorious for a lack of customer support, so do your homework. Most sites, like Template Kingdom, will tell you the format of the source files being provided with your download. If the source files are in Dreamweaver or Photoshop, you’ll of course want to have those programs and know how to use them before choosing that template. Or you can use the template, knowing you’ll be limited in the amount of customization you can implement. One bit of advice, regardless of your level of expertise: Always keep your originally downloaded files in a safe place, and create a separate copy you can work to perfect. That way, no matter how badly you mess something up, you can always start from square one if you have to!
TemplateKindgom.com
- Memberships, buyouts, and template tweakers. Some template sites offer a membership price for unlimited downloads. Unless you are designing sites for a living, it is unnecessary to join them. Many of the customer complaints out there have to do with memberships not being cancelled upon request and other issues surrounding recurring billing, so again, do your homework. You will also find several sites, like Template Monster, offering quality designs for download, but also offering templates with a “buyout” option. This option will cost you as little as $800, up to over $5,000, and it only ensures they will remove the template from their site going forward. It does not guarantee the design hasn’t been used before or even downloaded thousands of times. For that kind of investment, you can find a designer to build a comparable site and provide one-on-one support. The same goes for sites offering to customize or “tune-up” an existing template. With the number of designers hungry for work right now, browsing Craigslist, Guru, or Elance might just render you a better deal.
TemplateMonster.com
So the bottom line is that you don’t have to spend all your startup capital to have a cool site. Templates are a great alternative to costly custom sites, as long as you take the time to make sure you’re getting what you need. If you’ve used a template site, join the conversation, and let others know about your experience – good, bad, or ugly!
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19 Responses to “Template or No Template? What You Need to Know About Web Design”
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17. Feb, 2010
I have used a template for all my sites. Granted, they are information only sites and therefore don’t represent an actual business in terms of dealing with customer service. I know basic html and css and made an attempt at building my own site – too time consuming. So, for my purposes, a template is the way to go. I tweak some of the code to make it more “mine”.
Colby
17. Feb, 2010
I’ve been looking around for a new template for a couple of my WordPress blogs and I’ve been considering one of the membership price options for unlimited downloads.
Right now I’m looking closely at the Woo Themes membership option. My second choice is the Thesis developer option and then adding my own customizations. I’d love to hear feedback from anyone who has experience with either of these two sites/themes.
Web Design Beach
17. Feb, 2010
Well it really depends of website needs and plans. Templates are great for fast turnarounds but unique design is better for long term professional businesses.
Hulbert
17. Feb, 2010
Pretty cool article. Like what the first person said, templates are more for fast information and business (e.g. sales pages or opt-in forms). I think spending the money to create a good design is worth it in terms of separating yourself from all the other designs that are out there, as well as creating long-term relationships with the people that come onto your site. Thanks for sharing this.
David Siteman Garland
17. Feb, 2010
Nice article. I actually just did an episode on this today. My thoughts are if you are in a business for a long haul want to create a professional image and brand, splurging on a custom design is well worth it.
It also helps with media. If PR is important and landing in traditional & new media will help your business, the split-second a source looks at your page is important. Professional and unique are a massive advantage.
Just my 2 or 3 cents :)
Carla | Green and Chic
17. Feb, 2010
I have been skeptical of templates for a long time because a lot of them do look cheap and unoriginal. Its good to know that it does have to be that way. Actually, my web store is based on a highly modified template, but I would like to find some that I don’t have to do much with.
Rinaldi Syahran
17. Feb, 2010
Web design is something that I want to master. However, this is quite difficult to see I do not have basic. Things you do in writing in this post has given at least a little basic to me about web design. I was waiting for the writings of this kind. I hope you can include writing about web design especially technical way to create web design.
hotblogtips
18. Feb, 2010
I used free themes from wordpress for over 2 years, just started using Thesis last month and I love it.
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19. Feb, 2010
Good points. One of the main things I keep in mind is what Google and Facebook have epitomized for so long on their way to being the most successful in their category and that is functionality through simplicity. Flashiness is ok but not if it doesn’t serve to help browse the site.
Till then,
Jean
Web Yaz?l?m
19. Feb, 2010
You got a good point there. The template business has grown so far in these past few years. Because i remember templates being clumsy and all, after the Web 2.0 sickness, all template designers started trying to make their templates simpler just like twitter and all
But yeah, nice article. I’m glad more people uses templates now. It’s good for biz :)
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19. Feb, 2010
Web designers 15 years ago could charge crazy fees for custom original template design. The playing field has since shifted with all these open source and “free” web templates – they now charge crazy fees for customization (same goes with scripts).
It’s always funny to hear from my clients when they ask “hey, look I found this template for $50 from somewhere.com, can you help me just change the color a bit, move this element down by a few inches, blah blah blah” then I tell them “sure, it’s going to cost you $200″ and they then responded “WHAT???”
It’s amazing the same parallel selling goes with custom homes… you being with stock build, say base model of a $250K home, then they reel you in their design center, upsell you with upgrades such as granite counter tops, built-in home entertainment system, travertine tile floor, and at the end of the day you are looking at a $100K upgrade – sorry going off topic here!
rosario
20. Feb, 2010
Its good to know that it does have to be that way :)
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21. Feb, 2010
More great advice from you guys many thanks
I always like to keep the “F” design in mind for choosing a new site since thats how people read online
Cash Genie
21. Feb, 2010
Great Article! I always felt that template is really important. Mine is a review site, I have seen various paid templates but I have not found any thing perfect for that. Most of the templates I found were either for product companies or blogs or news. My hunt is still going on, I would surely have a look on the sites you mentioned.
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22. Feb, 2010
What web site can i go onto to start learning how to design web sites? What would be the best course to learn web design??
Ernie Zelinski
24. Feb, 2010
Just one important point regarding websites.
Not so long ago I took an Internet marketing course from the Internet Marketing Center in Vancouver, from which many of today’s Internet marketing gurus such as Tom Antion learned their crafts.
Jason Bax, the seminar presenter, stressed that in many cases ugly websites get a lot more traffic and make more a lot more money than professionally designed websites.
Regardless of how much money you spend, and how “cool” your website looks, if you don’t get any traffic to it, and if you don’t know how to sell your product on the website even if you get a lot of traffic, you will not be successful.
My favorite case of someone who has ugly websites and makes a lot of money is Tom Antion. Check out his flagship website at http://www.tomantion.com . Tom Antion, incidentally, makes $75,000 to $220,000 a month (not a year) doing what he does best – marketing on the internet.
Tom Antion says that he intentionally makes his websites just a little bit ugly to prove that his $100 websites will outsell most of the million-dollar websites every day of the year.
Another example is Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books. Check out his website at http://www.fonerbooks.com/ .
Website designers have been known to critisize Rosenthal’s website. Yet he gets over 8,000 visitors a day and makes over $100,000 a year from this website. As Rosenthal says, “These same website designers couldn’t make a nickel marketing on the Internet even if they owned the domain name sex.com.
In short, don’t overspend on website design. Whatever you save, spend it on learning how to market effectivley.
Ernie J. Zelinski
Author of “How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free”
(Over 110,000 copies sold and published in 9 languages)
and “The Joy of Not Working”
(Over 225,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages)
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15. Mar, 2010
I remember how ugly our first website was and took forever to build. It seems like now their are templates for everything and require no knowledge of coding at all. Thank you templates
Eric Graudins
29. Mar, 2010
I’ve been using the free AtaHualpa theme on my wordpress site for a few months.
This theme has amazing flexibility, and you can totally manage all aspects of its appearance from the theme options page.
Sure, there’s a bit of a learning curve involved in finding out where to change everything, but once you’ve done that it’s a breeze to configure for columnless squeeze pages, menu placement and appearance, etc, etc.
Get it from http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/atahualpa
cheers,
Eric G.