What a template is.
- It is a ready-made set of pages, made to be sold to many businesses.
- You change the logo, colours, copy and photographs, but the structure and the order of the sections stay the same.
- The same theme can turn up on a competitor’s website or on the website of a business in another field.
Your content bends to the template, not the other way round.
- A template has fixed places: three cards here, a large photograph there.
- If you offer five services, or they need explaining, the copy is cut to fit.
- What makes your business different is usually exactly the part that does not fit.
The hidden costs come later.
- Templates often bring plugins and code for features you will never use, and that can make the page heavier on a phone.
- An update to the theme or its plugins can break changes that were made on top of it.
- When you ask for something its maker did not plan for, adding it can take more work than it would in a design made from scratch.
A design from scratch starts with you.
- First come the pages you need and what a visitor has to find on each one.
- Typography, colour and motion follow from your identity, not from this year’s fashion.
- It can rely on established code libraries or on a platform such as Framer or Webflow and still be yours.
When a template is enough.
- For an event page that will stay online for a few weeks, a template can be a sensible choice.
- The same goes for testing an idea before you invest in it.
- If the website will be the first impression of your business for years, though, it is worth designing it for your business.
Written by the Omnica team.