When you decide to have a website for your business it means that you have already seen the benefits of your online presence. And having a website is a must in the 21st century for any business, either online or offline. So the first thing when building a website is to see if you are using a ready made template website design or a build a bespoke website. The latter will involve talking or hiring a bespoke web development company, but we will talk more in depth.
What are the key differences between a bespoke website and template website ?
When your customers will come to your website, that is the first interaction between you and them. So your business website must look and work amazing. So the way of creating the website is a very crucial decision to make. And when you decide, you will have two options: either build a bespoke website or a ready made template website design.
And now we want to see the differences between a template website and custom tailor website, aka a bespoke website. Also we are going to discuss the costs involving these two options and the advantages of going one route or the other. This might be the most important decision you can take for your online business when you build the website or app for it.
Ready Made Template Websites
When we are talking about a template, we can understand that is a pre-built site and that is available for anyone to buy and use from a certain vendor. So that means there is high chance that your website will look like other dozen websites. We assume that the template vendor will sell more than one copy of his website template. Usually they sell hundreds or thousands.
So when it comes to a template website, the customer would have the option to choose the design, but also change the colors and pictures and the artwork from the admin interface. Most of these templates are based on a CMS like wordpress, joomla, or others.
Hiring a developer to work on a template website
When working with any type of website template (but any website in fact) you can hire a web developer to work on it. A developer will need to also modify some of the code to make the changes that the customer desire. So even when using a template website you need to hire a developer to do some of the changes that involve coding. But its true that the amount of work and payment for that developer will be less than the case when he would do a website from scratch. The downside is that the website will not be as sophisticated as it would be with a bespoke website.
Working with a CMS like wordpress
Most of the ready made templates are based on wordpress these days, because wordpress powers over 34% of the websites in the world. But that doesnt mean that wordpress doesnt offer the chance to do bespoke websites. But the ready made templates are more popular and more cheaper than doing anything from scratch. So the advantage of using a cms is that you can easily add blog posts, news, event calendars and so on. We will see that with the correct plugin you can add fantastic functionality even to wordpress, like booking scheduler and others.
If you want to have that kind of complexity even in a regular cms like wordpress, you will need to use some specialised themes or plugins, and of course hire a web developer who also is a coder. Because usually these involve custom tailor changes which cannot be done from the admin area by adjusting some settings.
What are the Pros of Template Websites ?
One of the main pros for using a template website is the low cost that comes with. Usually developing a template can cost the web agency or the theme shop, thousands of dollars, but because they are selling it in hundreds or thousands of copies, they are able to keep the cost under 100-200$ a piece. That way instead of paying $5000 for something, you just pay 200$ and you have the template. The downside is that you will not be able to have it exactly like you want it. In some cases thats crucial.
If you are not very tech savy, and do not want to hire a wordpress developer, then you might be better off with a website template rather than customising yourself something made from scratch.
What are the Cons of Template Websites ?
The main issue, is that the site will not be exactly as you want, so if you want a very specific type of website. Or you want very specific functions, you will have to hire a developer to modify the template, or just create a site from scratch.
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