Cambridge Web Solutions Blog

25 January 2010

Why choose a bespoke website over a website template?

A website template is just that, it is a pre designed and coded, generic website that just needs some text and a few images pasting into it to adapt it to a particular business. A template tries to be all things to all people so is never perfect for a website.  Images will have to be shoe-horned into spaces that they were never meant to be in and logos will often look out of place.

The main problem with template websites is not how they look but how they are built. Whilst template websites will often look fairly professional to people viewing the site, search engines and screen readers will soon discover otherwise.

Template sites are often built using a WISIWIG (what you see is what you get) editor, these editors insert large amounts of unnecessary extra code, this extra code results in:

  • Search engines not ranking the site as highly
  • Bigger file sizes
  • Slower loading pages (not too much of a problem with broadband but if people are accessing your site through a mobile phone it is)
  • Increased bandwidth
  • Web users with sight difficulties who use screen readers not being able to read the site
  • The site appearing distorted and displaying incorrectly in some browsers
  • The site not meeting W3C web standards.

The main difference to a website owner will be when they want changes made to their website. A hand coded bespoke website uses what we call a style sheet, every single page will use that same style sheet. To make a change we simply edit the style sheet and it automatically changes every page within the site. Templates will not usually have as style sheet and changes will have to be made to every single page. A developer who has built the site from scratch will be able to make any changes, add new pages or make it so that you can edit the content yourself a lot more easily and quicker than amending a template.

Developers who use WISIWIG editors are not really developers at all, anyone could use one within about half an hour of opening it up and build a site within the hour (it's just a case of copying and pasting your copy across into it and adding images). Learning all the different programming languages as well as search engine optimisation techniques and keeping up will all the latest technologies within an ever changing industry takes years.

Another trend I’ve seen with website template companies is that although the initial cost of the website is low, they then charge a lot extra per month.  This means that over the course of 18 months you will have paid the same for your template website as you would for a bespoke, hand coded website which charges a reasonable hosting fee.

We realise that not everyone has the money to pay for their bespoke website up front so Cambridge Web Solutions will now let you pay for the site over 6 or 12 months.

There are times when a template website can be useful, if you have a family website or want a personal website and you don’t need it to appear in search engine results or attract customers then a template is perfect.  However if your website is for your business I would always go for a bespoke website coded by hand. If your website can easily be found on search engines such Google then your sales will almost certainly increase.  An attractive, well programmed website with good search engine optimisation offers one of, if not, the best return on investment.

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