Benefits of Website Templates

September 13, 2009

Web Templates

Okay, you are ready to join the masses and put up a web site. You’ve put a lot of thought into the design and are ready to go. Perhaps you should give more thought to using a web site template.

For many people, it makes more sense to use a pre-designed web template instead of creating a site from scratch. Using a pre-designed site template allows you to get a professional design at a fraction of the price a custom design would cost. A good template is automated or has HTML tags to show you exactly where to put your text. This saves you precious time. Also, a web page designed by someone just learning HTML is more likely to have mistakes than one designed and tested by professionals. Mistakes in web site code can prevent some users from being able to see a web page or can even cause lower search engine rankings.

There are millions of web sites on the Internet and there are more being born every second. Even though there may be more than one web site using the pre-designed site template you choose, the likelihood of a visitor seeing both sites is not great. Every site is unique in the data it presents. Web templates present data quickly and professionally without the hassle of designing anything.

Being that many web templates are under $50 and many custom site designs are well over $5000, it is easy to see how web templates can save money and time. Web templates are a good way for someone to learn HTML. By becoming familiar with code that has been written professionally, a webmaster can pick up on things along the way. Instead of having an amateur web site at the start, an HTML novice can have a professional site from the beginning with a pre-designed site template.

Search Engines also play a factor in choosing web templates. Sites with HTML mistakes do not fair well in search engines. Particularly in older versions of Netscape, forgetting one “table” tag can mean the whole page won’t show. A good web template has been designed and tested in many environments, to W3C standards, for maximum compatibility. Instead of thrashing your way through mistakes, take advantage of competent template designs.

If you are just starting out, a web site template could be the way to go. There are thousands of sites offering them for sale for very low prices.

When creating a new design for clients, XD Web Solutions will help you decide if templates, semi-customized, or a completely custom site is the way to get started based on your budget, site, and design needs.

Partially reprinted from Solutionfinders

About Kesha Brown

Kesha is the Creative Director and Principal Web Designer at her company XD Web Solutions who specializes in helping small businesses and organizations maximize their online presence. Go ahead and follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn.

6 Comments to “Benefits of Website Templates”

October 14, 2011 at 6:54 am
Chris Parker@franktown homes says:

Hello!! Kesha thanks for sharing this informative post but i had some queries regarding web templates?
some of my friend who knows about SEO they suggested me not to use those templates which available online, because of SEO prospect those are not compatible and the developers who designed these templates are pasted his signature on those?

Please!! help me what to do?

[Reply]
February 16, 2011 at 6:40 pm
Sanford Tester says:

My coder is trying to persuade me to move to .net from PHP. I have always disliked the idea because of the expenses. But he’s tryiong none the less. I’ve been using Movable-type on several websites for about a year and am concerned about switching to another platform. I have heard good things about blogengine.net. Is there a way I can import all my wordpress content into it? Any kind of help would be really appreciated!

[Reply]
Kesha
Twitter: xdwebsolutions
Reply:
February 16th, 2011 at 7:10 pm
Sanford, I don’t know anything about blog-engine.net except that it’s run on ASP. I would say the decision to change platforms will depend on if you will be maintaining your website yourself or having someone else do it.

If you will be maintaining it, be sure there’s an easy to use interface to make content changes where you won’t need to call your developer every time something needs to be changed, which gets very expensive.

I have always used PHP based websites (other than basic HTML sites) because it’s what I know. I currently am developing exclusively on the WordPress platform (unless it’s an eCommerce site) which is great for my clients as they can maintain the site themselves easily.

Let me know if there are other questions I can help you with.

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September 16, 2010 at 9:58 pm
XD Admin says:

Hey Silas, it was creatively designed by using part of a template and my own custom spin – all using WordPress

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September 16, 2010 at 9:38 pm
Silas Headen says:

This website is very good. How was it made !

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September 16, 2010 at 6:05 am
Ismael Kimura says:

An interesting post there mate ! Cheers for posting !

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