What’s wrong with using website design templates?

If you want a new or redesigned business website, you can choose between an off-the-shelf design template and a professional web design services. Many people don’t understand the implications of choosing a generic design template that is often free or bought for $100 dollars or less online. Sure, the price makes it sound like a great option… but is it really?

Let’s take a look at some of the problems you can run into if you decide to build a website using a template, rather than using professional web design services.

Your website looks the same as thousands of others

When one of your key marketing goals is to make your website stand out from the crowd, a website built from a generic template doesn’t cut the mustard, even if you’re changing some basics like the colours and fonts.

If your competitors are out-ranking you in search engines, you can pretty much guarantee that they have a website that is tailored to their exact needs, and not simply relying on a default template they got for next to nothing. This is where skilled and professional web design services can make a massive difference to the visibility of your website to both search engines and your visitors.

Your website isn’t tailored to your exact target audience

Even if you find a design template that has been put together for your industry and looks really good, it still needs to be tailored to your target audience. No two target audiences are alike and while you may share a similar audience with your competitors, there will always be differences.

It’s understanding these differences and designing your website to suit their needs that will help you to engage your specific audience and start to get an edge on the competition. Only the experience offered by professional web design services can give you this level of design; it doesn’t come with free design templates. Even small improvements can have a massive impact on your conversion rate, and ultimately, revenue.

Your website won’t match your brand messaging and colours

While many design templates give you various options for the layout, colour scheme, fonts, and so on, you’re always going to be working hard to shoehorn your brand into the design. Subtle improvements, such as matching the shape of buttons and images to your logo shape, can help make your website feel more cohesive and aligned to your brand. This subconsciously makes visitors feel that your website is on another level in terms of branding and design.

In addition, not presenting a consistent brand across your physical stores, website, and social media platforms can be one of the biggest causes of low visibility and poor rankings in search engines. On the other hand, bespoke web design services will ensure your website perfectly matches your overall company branding.

Your website won’t convey your professionalism

It’s fairly easy to spot poorly designed websites; those that look very similar to hundreds, if not thousands, of others online. This impression reflects poorly on your business, turning visitors away, either because they don’t trust you or they don’t take you seriously.

Once you reach certain limitations of website design templates, your only option is to pay for customisations, but this defeats the purpose of using a template in the first place. Customisations to templates can be very costly, because the developer has to work with code that may be poorly written or difficult to change. This can also result in bloated code, which slows down your website — again impacting on your search engine visibility and visitor conversion rates.

The ideal solution is to engage professional web design services to develop a website that is perfectly matched to your industry, brand and target audience, and will give you a significant edge on the competition. Talk to us today to find out more about how we can help grow your business through an effective, flexible and scalable website solution.