Advantages of using Website Templates
What you see is exactly what you get. With a readymade website template, you do not need to picture what the final product will look like, whether the web developer you’ve selected has actually comprehended your demands, whether your website will have to go with several changes and iterations prior to you’re satisfied with the end-product. The website template can be customized to your demands by altering the colors, images and text so that it ends up looking quite various from the initial.
Speed. Time is cash. Your website will be up-and-running within a fraction of the time it takes to develop a custom website– supplied, obviously, that you have the content and the pictures prepared to tailor your website template to fit you. A custom-designed website can take months to establish, depending on its complexity. Compare that time-frame to the few days or even hours for a website template to become a full-fledged website.
Expense. You can get an appealing, professionally-designed website template for as little as $30- $65 dollars. A custom-designed website might cost you anything up to $5,000. You likewise have access to multitudes of free templates although they are restricted in design and functionality, and you could not get the technical support you necessary.
Option Thanks to all the competition on the internet, you can pick from an abundance of designs and plans to match your demands. Consider it– a custom-designed website would offer you just 2 or three options to choose from. Online you are spoilt for selection when it concerns website design templates.
Appeal. The look of the site brings in prospects to your website. Readymade website templates are developed by the specialists who likewise create customized design templates. You have access to topnotch design quality without having to pay for custom design. You can search around and choose from thousands of appealing web template designs on the internet. However, you will find that some companies on the web offer website design templates of a higher quality than others. Don’t get carried away by the aggressive sales pitches on some sites. Use your discretion when choosing a web template that will say a lot about your company.
Note: You can choose any website template that you like the appearance and feel of, and customize it to your needs. Don’t get cramped for style by looking only for templates in your line of business. You can choose a music template, for instance, and tailor it to a food template.
Functionality. Expertly designed website templates will come pre-loaded with standard pages like ‘home’, ‘about’, ‘services’, and ‘contact’. Other website templates will give you add-on features to showcase a portfolio/photo gallery, or communication/community networking features like a blog, newsletter or bulletin board system. More complex website templates and e-commerce websites will offer dynamic features like online ordering, credit card processing and live chat. Remember that all these features will require backend support from your hosting company in order to function properly.
Navigation. How your website template looks is only half the story. What you need to know is how it works. How easy is it for your customer to find the content he’s looking for? How constant are the navigation links throughout the website? Does your visitor clearly know where he is, where to go, and how to return to where he started from? Website templates give you a feel for the navigation of your site.
Disadvantages of using Website Templates
Despite all the very real advantages of website templates, you should pause and consider some of the disadvantages. For example, how easy is it to customize the template to your requirements? Do you have the skills or the software to do it yourself?
Not exclusive and unique
Website templates are downloaded and used by many hundreds of users. So they are not exclusive and unique to your own company. You may wind up with a website that is a clone of many others. If you want to ensure that no-one else buys the same website template, you will have to pay many times the price. Besides, the same template may have been used by customers who downloaded it before you got there. You may need to custom-design your website if you want a design exclusive to your company or for your personal use.
Limitations on customization
A website template can not be tweaked beyond a point, so it may end up being non-specific to your requirements. If you have a great deal of website content but have chosen a web template with limited space for text, the additional text may change the look of the design by stretching it. At this point you may decide that the template doesn’t really work for you but you are stuck with it as you have actually already spent for it and downloaded it.
Certain software needed for personalization
While some website design templates are simple to customize, modify and upgrade, making use of readily available web authoring software like Microsoft Frontpage, others are more complicated and necessary understanding of photo-editing and website-building tools and coding.
Whether it is Macromedia Dreamweaver or Flash or understanding of HTML code, you may not have the requisite software or skills to customize, edit and update your website. In this case, you may need to use the services of a web developer to customize and/or update your web template for you.
Image optimization requires skills
You have to be familiar with optimizing images for the web so that your pages load quickly. If you do not have the needed skills and photo-editing software for image optimization, this will slow down the website development process and you could need to engage the services of a web developer.
SEO is your little
Website Templates will only give you the shell of your site. They are not optimized to attract search engines. You will need to do this with your website content. Keep in mind that search engines are more attracted to words than to pictures. A website template with a lot of graphics and Flash animation effects may look appealing, but may take longer to load and will not draw the search engines to your site. So despite the good looks of your Flash website, it may end up lower on search engine rankings.
While composing content, you have to utilize the keywords that promote your products or services and attract targeted customers to your site. You will also need to use meta-tags (Title tag, Keywords, Description) to attract the search engines to your web pages. Since content is the heart of your website, it is worth spending the time and energy to write it– or leave it to a professional material writer.
All in all, the advantages of using website design templates exceed the downsides.
So, plunge in, choose a web template and get your website going!
