Custom Website Design or Website Templates – The Great Debate

Many custom website designers are really critical of business website templates. I’ve seen sarcastic comments on forums and blogs like ‘This site has a template written all over it’. There are two main reasons for not liking templates, and then some ways to mitigate these issues.

Let’s explore these.

The templates are not original.

There is something to be said for creating your own work, all original. But there’s a difference between being somewhat artistic and being an artist with the ability to bring all the elements of a website’s headers, judicious use of graphics, menus and design together into a cohesive and pleasing whole. Not to mention creating a website with a definite wow factor and loading fast to boot.

I soon found out in my website design career that I’m not artistic enough to really create the effect I was looking for. My first websites were all built from scratch by hand and I spent hours and hours picking the right colors, selecting the graphics, optimizing the graphics, and designing the menus with the right rollover effects.

The most frustrating thing was that after my masterpiece was designed, it still fell far short of some of the other websites I regularly came across on my internet travels.

Now professionally designed website templates are, as the name suggests, designed by professional graphic designers. They may not be professional website designers as such, as these templates often have certain intrinsic flaws; however, most of the time the look and feel created by the template, especially its graphic elements, work together in a way that is difficult for someone to achieve. without years of practice or formal training (not to mention intrinsic artistic abilities and talents!)

But let’s look at the second reason why people don’t like templates:

Templates are often poorly designed from a website design perspective.

Website templates may look good on the outside, but any experienced website designer will tell you that internally they suffer from the following problems:

1. In most cases, they don’t use cascading style sheets to control layout, fonts, or colors. Some of them make nominal use of an external css file, but most of the time styling commands abound within the html code, often negating the benefit of the external style sheet.

2. Probably the biggest problem and web design purist’s biggest nightmare is that most of these templates are heavily table based. While tables undeniably make it easy to quickly place text and graphics, it goes against good website design. Tables are supposed to contain content, not website design elements.

3. The last big problem is that they are rigid. Often a content block has a specific size and if your content doesn’t fit into that, that’s your problem! Because the content and presentation are not separated, it is very easy to break the template if you want to make major changes to the content of your website.

So how can you overcome these persuasive negatives associated with using templates?

First of all, the fact that there might be another site somewhere that might look the same shouldn’t really be a deterrent. There are more than 8 billion pages on the Internet, according to Google. It’s true that there are fewer websites than pages, but even with an average of 16 pages per website, we could have close to 500 million possible websites. What are the possibilities? But there are things that can be done to minimize the scream template effect:

1. Stock photos and graphics used in the template can often be replaced with photos of the company or person the website is being designed for. Even simply using other stock photos or graphics can make a world of difference.

2. Company logos can be incorporated in relevant places

3. Sometimes the entire color scheme can be changed using tools like Photoshop or Fireworks.

Second, bad template design elements can be addressed as follows:

After all the effort I put into designing my websites from scratch, I soon ran into the maintenance problem. Successful websites need content. They need a lot of content and they need content to be added in a constant stream. The only tool that can help you do this is some kind of content management system.

There are several of these available commercially or under the GPL license; people have their own favourites. The point is that most content management systems work on the principle of separating content from presentation, and therefore work on some kind of template system.

Therefore, the best solution is to convert the business website template to the CMS template format. I often convert business website templates, after appropriate modifications to the graphics to customize them, to my favorite Joomla CMS template format. During the process I keep the graphics but move all the styling to an external style sheet; I get rid of the tables and make use of CSS positioning. And because you’re using a CMS, you can easily add menus, new pages, and all the other bits of content you want without breaking the layout.

As far as I’m concerned, the best of both worlds….