Why Custom Designs are so much better than Premade Templates

We have changed our focus away from providing premade templates for websites to more custom designs. We work with each new customer to create something unique for their business website rather than using existing templates.

It is a big change for our business but here are some of the reasons why we have made the change.

  • Loads of man hours in to website templates

  • In time website templates are dated and need to be replaced

  • New web browser capabilities allow us to add new features

  • New management tools don't integrate well into less flexible designs

  • Happy customers means more money

In every industry, things change. There are new ideas and designs become dated over time, so putting thousands of hours into building templates does not make much sense when we can create custom designs for each new customer, give them something unique and spend less time overall.

Templates don't work for us anymore because:

1.) It takes loads of man hours to make templates. To create 1000 templates we might have 2-5 hours into each template,so if we average that at 4000 hours @ $20+/hr we might invest $80,000.00 building templates. That is a lot of money and well worth it if everyone could use one of the templates.

The problem we have had is that templates don't translate. In other words, when people look at the templates, they don't visualize the design with their own content. So most people look at a gallery of over 100 designs and figure they don't have one they can use. At that point, they look for another host that has something they like.

Well, with thousands of professions, it is impossible to make 1000 templates for each one, we would have to have millions of templates to browse through and still, nobody would find exactly what they are looking for.

So we have invested, time a bundle of money and it was costing us customers because they though they had to use one of our templates and none of them made them happy.

Even though the templates could be modified, people don't see the forest for the trees. They see something that does not wow them and that is bad business.

2.) In a short time after spending all the cash on the templates, they are dated and nobody wants them. So it is almost impossible to keep up.

In the beginning, offering 1000 templates put us ahead of everyone, because small companies just can't afford to do that or spend full time for 2 years to build templates. So what we offered at discounted rates did work very well.

But over time, the templates became stale, people wanted new looks, new trends and new features.

Animated gifs faded as javascript slideshows emerged. Flash and other fancy display mediums took over the static templates and the interest in what we had was fading.

So we created more flexible layouts. Tools to set the layout of a page and not be limited to a pre designed website template. We created a gallery of thousands of titlespaces that could be modified and this gave us a more modern look without any real limits to the design.

Again, even with over 4000 unique title spaces, we would get people that say, "none of them works for m business".

We explain, they can be modified, add your logo, add you text and it will be what you want.

But they did not have the desire, the drive or the design ability to do that, so we did it for them.

3.) Over time, browsers change, allow for more features, like CSS and new looks and styles. What was not possible 3 years ago, is now possible. What we could build 4000 hours ago, is now being eclipsed by new looks.

I guess artists deal with this all the time. Keeping up with trends, updating and making things seem new. Architects have to make more contemporary designs. Interior decorators shift from Formica counters to granite and stainless appliances. Cars don't look like they did 10 years ago, nothing is the same.

So having templates just was not working. We could not keep up or make enough templates to make all of our customer happy.

4.) Static templates were also making it more difficult for us to add new tools to the management interface since we had never planed on adding those features when the templates were designed.

So templates had to be modified, changed and sometimes rebuilt just to add a single new tool for our users.

After several rebuilds of the old templates we just had about enough.

90% of the new designs did not use the templates, the templates were old, dated and just did not offer what the rest of our system could do.

5.) It made so much more sense just to build custom designs than to mess with maintaining a gallery of old work.

In fact, if we spend 2-5 hours creating a custom design for a customer, we have less time overall and the customer has something unique that they can work with.

There is no question that when someone see, their colors, their logo, their photos in a web page it invokes a different emotion than when they see a template.

We still have to work very hard, but our customers have what they want, not something that we thought of years before they even became customers of ours.

It is not that the templates were bad, it is just that we could never offer premade designs to make everyone happy.

But if we do customer work as part of the overall service, then our customers are very happy.

We have been able to create unique looks, designs, colors and styles that fit each business. Take a company's logo and turn it into an entire page design, following the styling of what they already have.

It really is nothing new, since we always offered free customization of templates with hosting. But now we don't even let people use the templates, we just create one for each customer.

Ultimately, having happy customers means we make more money.

 

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