The Short-Comings of Do-It-Yourself Web Design

Using a web page template may seem like a good way to save money while you create your site. However, there are several pitfalls to buying a pre-made design. What you save in pennies might result in lost time and worse, lost business and web traffic.

Your brand is unique. Shouldn’t your web page reflect this? Pre-made templates minimize the impact your brand will have to your internet audience. If you purchase a template, you risk your website looking like hundreds of others online. Your website will not stand out among the crowd and attract fewer visitors.

Unless you are an experienced web designer, you may feel out of your depth customizing your template. Worse, some templates available online have very limited customibility. This may mean the web site you develop may not fully suit your needs. Pushing the square peg of your content into the round hole of your template may result in a web site that is hard to navigate and fails to be user friendly. And when something in your site breaks down, you may find that you cannot fix the problem. A broken site is a red flag to your viewers that your business or organization is not up to date and may be cutting corners.

Some templates, especially free templates, come at the cost of serious SEO problem. They may contain serious bugs, “junk codes” and other issues that can make a website completely invisible to a search engines. A web page that cannot be found by your audience is about as useful as not having a website at all.

Ultimately, when you chose to use a template for your web page, you are sacrificing control. Make sure your web page works for your business by creating a page that best suits your specific needs and makes your brand pop.