Your Website – Custom Designed or Template?

A quick Internet search will reveal the tens of thousands of people out there all wanting to make a better website for you. They range from sites where you do the work with the help of a template, to those that offer a one-off custom-built design. The former are usually “free”; the latter may cost more or less depending on the skills of the designer, and how much they think they can charge their customers.

Both methods of preparing a website come with good and bad points. Let’s have a look at both.

Using a template
Places that offer you the use of a free template, where you choose one of a number of designs and then add words and graphics to suit yourself, often want to be able to host the website for you once you are organized (and then charge you for that). Some offer more pages for your use than others.

Good points are that this is a comparatively inexpensive way to get an online presence, especially if you are new to website publishing; you don’t need to know any HTML code as you just “fill in the gaps” and upload some images; and you can change the site quickly and easily, as often as you want. They usually look good to start with, so you don’t even need design skills, except to change some colors and fonts according to your preference.

Bad points, depending on what your requirements are, are that the templates from any site have a very similar overall appearance, which is not always useful if you want to portray a particular brand. There are limited things you can do with these sites, because they are designed to keep things as simple as possible, for the benefit of the user. As well, the URL may not be exactly what you had in mind – unless you pay for a domain name as well.

Some examples of templates can be seen at: geocities.yahoo.com/v/pb.html

Custom designed websites
This is where you really have to be choosy and do your research before signing on. A custom-designed website is great if you have definite ideas about what you want from the site; how you want it to look; and a brand to portray. It will be unique – no one else in cyberspace will have a design like yours. If you want to mount an e-commerce sight, or perhaps include a chat room, then you need the help of a web designer, who has training in these more complicated aspects of web design.

The good points are that you can expect a high standard of presentation – the graphics should look great – and, as long as you can communicate your needs and wants clearly to your designer, the site should do all you ask of it (and possibly, more).

The bad points are the price tag – you need a good budget for this, but shopping around will help – and the time it may take to get the bugs ironed out and the site up and running.

Always look at other work the website designer has done – there should be an online portfolio, or links to follow – before you settle on the company to work with.

Finally, remember the website is only half the story. Making sure it is optimized for search engines, measuring performance for free with Google Analytics (see google.com/analytics/) and keeping the content lively and fresh is the other half, so people don’t just visit once, they return time and again!