Lots of Web sites are based upon pre-designed templates, with placeholders which a website owner or website designer can fill in: “Company name,” “Your tag line here!” Some Web design companies on the Costa Blanca even publish portfolios of sites based on website templates—at least they look like website templates to me. Is there anything wrong with using such templates, instead of having a bespoke Web site?
Let me admit, to begin with, that many website templates are elegant and professional.
I still don’t like them. And here are 5 reasons why.
- Elements of the template—and sometimes the entire template—may be inappropriate. The imagery may not be right for this particular Web site, or the colour scheme, or the layouts, or the navigation. In extreme cases an entire site has to be created following a formula dictated by a given navigation scheme. Or the number of top-level pages is limited by a given set of navigation buttons. Visitors may find it harder to do what they want on the site, because the template isn’t designed for specific visitor tasks.
- Even where the look and feel of a template is OK for a particular Web site, and visitor tasks are not hampered, the website template may not express what is most important about a business or organisation—its own character, its unique selling point.
- There is no real design input from the client—no chance for her or him to stamp their own wishes or personality on their own Web site. The best they have is a choice between templates.
- There is no real call on the website designer’s craft. The client gets a supermarket ready meal instead of a menu of chef-prepared dishes.
- Most important: the template Web site will not work for the client as it would if it were the result of serious preliminary analysis. Before design comes analysis: what will count as success for this particular Web site? what visitors does the client expect or want to attract? how are these specific visitors most likely to join in the campaign/sign up/part with their money (whatever)?
No template-based Web site will ever work for a client the way a bespoke Web site can.
