Custom Templates vs. Off-the-Shelf Templates

I once had a potential client ask me to build a custom website for his business. When I quoted him a price of around $750, he said, “Why is it so much? I thought it would only cost me around $75.” After a brief discussion, I explained to him that building a custom website takes valuable time that I would be delivering a quality service.

He proceeded to show me a template website showcasing thousands of off-the-shelf templates ranging in price from $50 to $100. I tried to show to him the differences between my custom website service and the generic theme he wanted and explain how a custom design would benefit his new online business. Unfortunately, he was more fixated on the price than anything else. This is a common problem I have encountered many times over the last few years.

Off-the-shelf templates carry the obvious advantage of having a cheap price. You can even download some templates for free. However, like everything in life, you get what you pay for. A professional web designer can help build your online presence and craft a custom image for your company, but you will have to pay for their services.

Whatever you may call them (templates, themes or skins), website templates are essentially a set of styles and graphics used to create a consistent look and feel throughout a website. If you click around this blog, you’ll easily notice that several design elements are carried throughout the entire site – graphics, text formatting, column positions, navigation, etc. A template is basically a set of files that replaces the default theme in a content management system, blog software, or ecommerce platform. Having a consistent image is important when you’re trying to achieve professional results.

Comparing an off-the-shelf template and a custom website design is like comparing apples and oranges – I hate to use an old adage like that, but it’s true. There are big differences between the two that are not always apparent on the surface. There are lots of things going on in the background that the vast majority of your visitors will never see, but it does affect the user experience and the results you expect from your website.

Problems with Off-the-Shelf Templates

There are several websites that offer off-the-self templates that webmasters can download for free or for a nominal fee and install on the backend of their website. Graphic artists work hard to create these templates and I have to admit that some are absolutely stunning. However, there’s a catch – by the time you find the template you want, there could already be hundreds of even thousands of other website using the same template – maybe even your competition. When creating an image for your website, you don’t want to look like everyone else on the block. The internet would be a very boring place if every website was using the same template.

Now you could purchase an “exclusive” license to use a template, but if the template has been available for any length of time, it’s still possible that hundreds of other websites could be using the same exact template. Not only that, but the purchase price for the license may be as much or more than the cost for a custom design, so why not go ahead and get hire a web designer to begin with.

Some off-the-shelf templates can look generic or are simply too difficult to customize for the end user. Most people think that you just download the template, install it on the backend and away you go. While that may be true in a few cases, generally, the end user wants some type of customization to the template – most commonly injecting their company logo into the design. Sometimes it can appear that a logo is just “hanging out” on the template and doesn’t fit well into the design.

Another problem I have often seen with off-the-shelf templates is that they are often not user friendly or search engine friendly. I know that everyone wants a fancy new Flash website with all kinds of crazy stuff going on in the background, but what are you losing in the process? While your website may look great with a particular template, it may not be able to deliver the results you desire. Sacrificing the user experience or limiting your exposure in the major search engines are surefire ways to cause your website to fail.

Custom Websites Just are Better

Now I don’t want anyone to think that I’m bashing all templates – I’m trying to show a few key differences between off-the-shelf templates and custom templates. I use templates all the time as part of my designs – it’s just that I use custom themes that I have designed myself.

When a client comes to me and wants a custom website, I develop a new concept or take their existing concept and build a theme from it. It doesn’t matter whether I’m designing the site as a straight HTML build or if it’s a template for a PHP script – the process is basically the same. As I design a website, I’m not only thinking about the various graphical elements in the template, but also the code in the background and how the user will interact with the various elements.

Custom websites have several advantages over standard off-the-shelf templates. With a custom website template, you don’t have to worry about looking like a thousand other websites. Since a web designer takes a raw concept and builds a theme around it, the end product will most certainly result in a unique look.

Since a custom template is being built with your company’s brand image in mind, your logo will look like it belongs there. No more logos “floating around” in whatever space you can find. I have designed entire websites around a single logo design, so don’t discount the ability of a web designer to integrate your logo into a website.

A good web designer is more than just a graphics guru and can build a website template capable of delivering a positive experience for the end user. Navigation is an extremely important part of the user experience. When I design a website, I’m constantly thinking about how all of the pieces will fit together and how to get visitors from point A to point B as smoothly as possible.

Most off-the-shelf templates do not include any SEO-ready elements. In fact, Flash templates are just plain unfriendly towards search engines. All web designers offer different levels of service, but one of the things I always make sure to include in my custom website designs is a certain element of search engine friendliness. Unless you have a massive marketing budget to promote your website offline, then you need the search engines to succeed in the online world. Your website has to play nice with the search engines if you want to gain any traffic from them.