Template experience
How to choose a site template [in a proper way]
Creating a well-functioning, attractive and, most importantly, user-friendly website is not a simple task to accomplish. The first question inevitably arises: what is better - to develop an individual design for a site in its own corporate style and taking into account all its preferences, or not to waste time / money and use a ready-made template, just adapting it for your project?
Of course, in certain cases template design is much cheaper and is several times faster. The main thing is to choose the right template (see below how to do it). But, do not forget that this method is fraught with limitations.
What to consider when choosing a template
— First of all, its structure. If it differs significantly from the requirements of the structure of the final site and needs strong editing, we strongly advise you not to use such a template. Templates should be used in cases where all the necessary edits are reduced to a simple replacement of the image and adding the desired text. Taking a template for modeling a new site using the elements of its design, usually, it is very difficult to predict the final result of the project. In such cases, it is recommended to use template links to form a new design. In other words, templates can give an understanding of what you like and bring this information to the designer and developer. A significant difference between the corporate style and the original one used in the template ultimately leads to the disappointment of the site owners: a lot of time and money spent, and the result is mediocre. Therefore, you should choose templates in such a way that they maximally correspond to the corporate style (corporate colors, logo, fonts). There were quite a few cases where customers bought ready-made website templates in order to save on development from scratch. But, trying to fit their website and their corporate identity into a template, they were extremely dissatisfied with the result. Thinking that the problem is in the template itself, the customer buys a new one, and the situation repeats. In fact, the essence of the problem is - the template contains specific and clear design parameters, structure and style. Any changes and rearrangement of design elements at the request of the client lead to the fact that the overall picture of the site and the design itself looks bad and requires additional development.The maximum that a business owner or a marketer can do in such cases to create a new site is to use the structured content of the existing site and to give links to favorite templates. For reference. There are a lot of orders / projects for editing templates (for example, on the Upwork exchange). The amounts of fees for such orders often exceed the cost of creating a personal design and website. You can verify this by looking through similar services.
What to do if I have already bought a template?
— The best way is to use it for its intended purpose - for marketing. For example A / B testing, creation of lead generation, e-mail newsletters and so on.