Should I use an off-the-shelf website template?
If you've ever looked around at getting a website built for your business, you'll have no doubt run into the companies offering pre-built website templates, ready to drop in to your Wordpress or Drupal site. Some of these templates are quite good looking, there's no doubt about it! They're usually a bit generic, that's to be expected, but there are some modern designs out there that would make any business look great online. They're cheap, too! So, if this is such a great deal, what's the catch?
Off the shelf templates can work fantastically for your business, so long as the template provides *EXACTLY* the structure that you are after.
It's like buying an off-the-shelf suit. If it happens to fit you perfectly, great! If the only issue is that the trousers need taking up a bit, then that's super easy to do, fantastic. If the shoulders are too wide, well... nothing short of complete dismantling the suit and sewing it back together again is going to fix the issue.
Some changes can be made very easily to a template website, but others will be such a chop and change that you would have been better off building it custom in the first place. And the kicker? Unless the change is utterly trivial, you probably won't know what's easy and what's hard until you try and make the changes. Every template has been built in a way that suits the template, not the changes you want.
It's also not at all unusual that removing stuff from a template is just as time consuming as adding new stuff, or changing what's there. Sometimes the template authors have written in all sorts of dependencies that you don't see until you're trying to change how it works, and it really doesn't take many things going wrong until you reach the point where it might have been easier to just implement the design from scratch.
Things in particular to be aware of: Generally, hiding individual elements is pretty simple. Changing images and text is of course easy. Reusing or repurposing elements of the template may or may not be so simple, and making structural changes, like changing a fixed-width site to full width, can be deeply painful.
The suit analogy holds up pretty well - if it's almost a perfect fit off the rack, then you might just save yourself a bunch of money and still come out looking good. If you're looking at yourself in the mirror and it's a weird baggy fit... steer clear! There's nothing that looks cheaper than an ill-fitting suit, no matter how much it cost. The same applies to your website - if it looks like a cheap hatchet job, then what will people think of you as a business!
Assembler is a web design agency based in Perth, Western Australia. This blog is intended to be an informal, behind the scenes look into the web design and development industry. If you like our content, please follow us on LinkedIn or Facebook!