Website Templates vs Custom Web Design
With professional web site design now a well established industry, you now have all sorts of options when it comes to employing a web designer or web design company. One choice you may have to make is between a template based website design and a custom web design. Ultimately this decision depends on the purpose of the site and other factors such as budget constraints. This article outlines the respective benefits of each.
Using a pre-built website design template has a number of advantages. Since the templates are pre-built, creating your website will probably be a lot quicker as a lot of the work has already been done. It may only take your website designer or web design agency hours or days rather than months or weeks to put your information into the website design template and have your site up and running with a professional web design. There are some free web design templates available on the World Wide Web, but usually you must pay to use a web design template. However, this cost is usually much less than you would have to spend to have a professional web design made for you from scratch by website designers or web design agencies, so you can still save money.
A further benefit of pre-built, template based website design is that it is tried and tested. Creating professional web site designs is not as simple as designing a printed product, since the way a website design looks depends on the visitor's computer system. As such every professional web design must be tested thoroughly so that it looks as similar, or as good as possible, regardless of what browser software is used to view it. Web designers have already done this testing for professional web design templates, so you can be sure that most, if not all, potential problems will have been solved already, saving more time and consequently money.
Although using a pre-built template does mean that you are limited to using these off-the-shelf website designs, there is a vast range out there, so you're almost certain to find one that you like and that you would be happy to form the basis of your website design. Thanks to the use of CSS web design, website designers can keep the content and style of a website design separate, meaning that many web design templates can be customised in all sorts of ways without much modification, for example attributes such as fonts and colours.
Contrastingly, a custom web design is one that requires a website designer to build it from nothing. The obvious benefit of this is that you will get a totally original website design which is tailored to your needs. If you use a website design template and it doesn't exactly fit with what you want, then you will either have a website design which isn't exactly right, or have to pay for website designers to amend it, defeating the purpose of using a pre-built template, whereas with custom website design you have control over every aspect of the design as it is being made. While it is likely that a custom web design will be a lot more expensive than one using a web design template, the money you spend on website designers' time lets you make sure that your site is absolutely perfect for your needs. If you spend money on a web design template and then have to pay a web designer to adapt or change it, or worse find that the template has extra features you don't need, then it is hard to see the value of using a template in the first place. Adapting or editing an existing web design can also be more time consuming for a website designer than making the same changes to a design they have made themselves, since it will always be harder and take longer to change another person's code than to work on your own.
Although there is a huge range of available website design templates, they tend to follow similar and established styles and layouts, so your website design is unlikely to stand out particularly. There's also the possibility that one or more other sites will be using the same or a very similar template. If you want a truly original and unique professional web site design, the only realistic option is employing a website designer or web design agency to build the whole thing from scratch. If you have a web designer or web design company working on your site from the ground up, there may be opportunities for innovation which wouldn't exist when working from a template. Your web designers will be able to suggest new features or layouts which make your site special and memorable as well as useful and aesthetically pleasing. Custom design also means that your website design can be built around your organisation's existing style, logo or brand, which is much harder to do with a pre-built template.
