Over the last decade, WordPress has had a dramatic impact on the web development business. Open source solutions and professional templates have made WordPress a ‘go-to’ solution for businesses of all sizes.

The benefits of WordPress are clear. Giving clients the ability to manage their own content and add extended functionality in-house are great advantages. WordPress boasts over 75 million websites for good reason. It is free. it is powerful, and home to one of the most active communities of any platform.

One of the first choices you will make when building a website is whether to hire a designer or to save money using an off-the-shelf template that gets you ‘close enough.’

Beware of fancy animations, hi-res CG artwork and polished studio photography.

There is a danger with a $50 dollar template. Beware of fancy animations, hi-res CG artwork and polished studio photography. These are lures designed to attract attention, but often have little to do with marketing your business online. Will your customers want to see animations every time they come to your site? When you upload your company logo, will the theme still have the same impact? Template driven websites often deliver complicated back-ends, rigid programming environments and repetitive layouts.

Getting by on the Cheap

Businesses are asking small agencies to use open source website solutions and off-the-shelf templates. If there is a theme that gets you most of the way there, all the more reason to use it, right? Unfortunately, there is a flaw in this reasoning. More often than not, decision makers can’t tell the difference or have a hard time understanding how custom design solutions will affect their bottom line.

This creates the false impression that web design is an area where a company should be saving money and that all websites are created equal.

Would you ever hire an agency and say, ‘your design must work with as many different companies as possible?’

There is one challenge at the heart of designing templates, ‘Will this look work for a lot of different brands?’ There is an opportunity lost here. Would you hire an agency and say, ‘your designs must work with as many different companies as possible?’

In a less is more environment, you can get away with a lot. Bright websites with flat designs and simple colors are a step in the right direction, but there is more to making a website than offering up a clean presentation.

Your Brand is Your Guide

Your outgoing optics should be aligned under a united set of standards. If you find a theme that works for you, that is great, but make sure that it represents your company’s product and culture.

Details matter, and a well thought out and executed website has a maturity about it that a canned solution just does not offer. Sub pages are tailored to fit content and custom solutions have more personality. Make no mistake, most websites built with cheap templates can be spotted a mile away.

If you put a picture of your product in your header, where there was once a beautiful sunset shot of Fiji, it won’t look that great. If you try and stick a stock photo in there, it will not look much better.

Do your company’s services break into 3 main concepts? Are you, as a result, only looking at templates that have 3 feature areas on their home page? Are you planning on capturing email addresses? Is that template that you like so much responsive?

By the time you include the essential elements that your website will need, you will have fewer and fewer looks to choose from. Factor in color, taste, and the exercise of trying to find the perfect template becomes much harder.

The True Cost of Building a Website

Once you have selected a template, and have it customized, you will need to pay people to write blog posts, update products, be active on social media, launch campaigns and everything else necessary for managing an effective online presence.

If you do choose to design from scratch, your site will likley be faster, easier to maintain and your layouts will have been created to match your content, not the other way around.

Unless you are operated with minimal resources, the costs for having a custom design and theme created are small. If you do choose a custom template, your site will likely be faster, easier to maintain and your layouts will have been created to match your content, not the other way around.

When people visit your website, they will get to know your company with a website that reflects the level of quality that you strive so hard to maintain.