You’ve probably seen ads for cheap or free design templates that you can use to get your website up and running. “Completely customizable!” the ads say. “Cheap and easy, who needs a designer?” While it may sound like a great idea, there are many hidden pitfalls of using website templates for your business.
Shopping for a website template seems easy enough: Browse designs you like, pick one out, make the purchase, then spend the rest of the day rolling around in the cash you saved. But if you like a particular template, chances are that plenty of other people do too, and they already established their brands online with those templates and designs, years before you’ve even posted your first page. If customers already associate your design with another more established brand, their natural inclination will be to devalue your brand as a cheap imitation. And when people devalue your brand, you lose money. Now how much have you saved?
Imagine you opened a new pizza restaurant in an existing location. You looked through the windows and it was absolutely beautiful, so you bought it from the company that built it. Turns out, however, that your customers are going to need bigger tables to seat all of their friends, and to hold all that delicious pizza they’re going to eat. You go back to the builder to request bigger tables, but you find that the only thing the builder can do for you is change the color of the tables, or the walls, or maybe make another door to the restaurant. How are those changes going to serve your needs?
This analogy extends to the web as well. Pre-existing website templates might seem like a terrific idea at first, but chances are that your needs are as unique as your business, and no template – no matter the amount of options for color schemes or fonts – is going to meet those needs precisely. You would have to pay somebody to make fundamental changes to that template, which takes time and additional money. Or you’d have to live with a website that can’t accommodate your business, which will also cost you money.
At Torx, we know that your business is unique, which is why we specialize in one-of-a-kind sites to meet your needs. Take a look at some of our recent work, and drop us a line below or by phone at 804-577-8679 to let us know how we can tailor-make a site just for you.