Today, many smart small businesses are choosing to use a website template, rather than employ a website designer. Why? The benefits are clear: cost, quality and functionality.
Website templates bridge the gap between the amateur website owner learning to create his/her own website – with all the associated pitfalls - and a custom high-end website design by a qualified professional.
What is a website template? A web template is a ready-made design for your website, complete with images, sample navigation layout, sample pages and possibly even some Flash animation. It is an empty website, just waiting for you to add your content.
Click here to see some website templates.
What about building your own, or hiring a designer?
Why not just make your own website? If you have FrontPage, you could even use one of Microsoft’s built-in templates. Well, the answer is easy – professional image. You will look like a rank amateur with a five-minute design that any computer literate kid could have put together. Really, there is no way to sugar-coat this – if you do not have design experience, don’t bang up a website and expect it to be a professional portrayal of you / your business!
So then do you have to spend $1000 or more having a website designed for you? Well, you could. But you no longer need to!
A professional design at a very low cost
Choosing a ready-made web design template allows you to browse through a large collection of different designs until you find one that you like. You can usually see at least a screenshot of what your web page will look like, and in many cases you can see the template “in action” – which lets you see exactly what you will be getting.
If you choose your template correctly, you will have a professional design, executed by a qualified designer with all due attention to accessibility, standards compliance, browser quirks and a lot of other things that you would not want to have to learn about from scratch, yourself! And for a small fraction of the cost of hiring a website designer to create you a custom design. Templates usually retail between $10 and $60.
This website has a collection of professionally-designed, original templates which are directly supported by the actual developer of the template: Website Templates Shop. All Premium Templates at this online store have a see-in-action option, and consist of multiple pages.
Avoid the common mistakes made when choosing a website template
What are the pitfalls? Well, don’t assume that absolutely everything within the template can be easily changed. If you’re unsure whether a particular graphic used can be easily replaced by your own image, ask the template designer! Sometimes a design element is an intrinsic part of the template, and you can’t just “swap it out” without technical knowledge. Good template designers will offer a customization service to perform this kind of function for you.
Also, the template is only a look-and-feel. Some high-end templates have database back-ends and so on built in, but straightforward website templates are generally a “shell” for your website. You will need to add the content for your site – and to do that, you will need to edit the template. These days web editors are very easy to use, but be aware that you will need to do add content to the template to make into your website.
And finally, website templates are sold more than once – so you won’t have the only website on the Internet that looks like yours! I don’t consider this to be a problem at all – with Google having over 8 billion sites in its index (as of May 2005), the chances of someone seeing another site that looks like yours are negligible. If this does worry you, ask the template designer about buying the template for exclusive use. This will increase the price substantially though, and depends on the template not having sold before.
In summary, website templates are a fantastic cost-effective way to produce an attractive, professional website at a fraction of the cost of hiring your own web designer.
Take a look at some of the website template designs available.