Having a good-looking and easy-to-use website is a must-have for any business today. Taking their business online provides owners with many benefits, including much broader audience and new ways of presenting the products and services to potential customers. When it comes to creating a website many business owners stand in front of a tough choice: whether to choose a professionally designed website or opt for a pre-made template they can customize to their needs. 

Who May Need a Pre-made Website Template

Pre-made website templates has long time been considered somewhat of a second best in web design. Common complaints about templates included poor SEO, buggy code or inability to provide deep customization. But the times are changing and today lots of those concerns are gone. Thus, many designers start using pre-made templates as a base for their projects. Ready-to-use website templates can be a perfect solution for: 

• Small or local business website. These businesses are usually tight on budget, so hiring a professional designer may cost them a pretty penny. Additionally, smaller businesses may not need too complicated websites that web design studios usually offer;
• Personal website. Today many Internet users tend to have a personal website for posting their own opinions on various topics. Most people cannot afford hiring a professional, and they don't really need that. Templates are absolutely enough for this category of people;
• Landing pages. These pages don’t always require web design skills. Really good examples of pre-made templates for landing pages can be found on various website builders;
• Beginner web designers. Tweaking and customizing ready-to-use templates can be a good practice for beginners. It not only helps novice designers learning basics of web design, but also helps learning code, provided CSS is well organized within those templates. 

Today we may see that more and more websites that appear on the web are made on a base of ready-to-use templates. They are customized to achieve some unique features and their own style. Renowned brands and companies make use of pre-made templates for their sub-websites in recent times. Thus, templates were used by such brands as DKNY, Shutterstock (blog) and HBO’s Game of Thrones.

6 Reasons to Choose a Pre-Made Template 

Ready-to-use templates may not be a work of art like some custom-made websites. But they perfectly deal with basic tasks of a small business website. Here are the main reasons of choosing a pre-made template over the one created by a web design studio.

1. Price

Custom-made websites are really expensive today. If you’re tight on budget, a pre-made template is the right choice that gives you a cool-looking website. Even hiring a web designer to customize a template for you will be much cheaper than paying thousands of dollars to a web studio. 

2. Customization

Most of modern website builders offer flexible designs that can be easily customized and look absolutely different on various websites. You can change a logo and title of the website, edit background, fonts and images etc. Many website builders offer supporting services on customization and installation of your template. 

3. Content

 If you have a lot of content and should manage it by yourself you should opt for a content management system. Many of today available CMS offer nice-looking website templates with great content-management options. 

4. Usability

Many business owners choose custom-made websites because of their fancy design. However, today’s trend to simplicity and usability requires website owners to pay more attention to better user experience. If your $5,000 website is full of bells and whistles but offers poor UX, you will fail. Pre-made website templates today are modest in terms of design, but offer better usability features.

5. Responsiveness

Since last year Google lowers mobile-unfriendly websites in SERPs, fully responsive and mobile-friendly website becomes a today’s must-have for absolutely any business. Modern website builders offer fully-responsive website templates right out of the box. So you don’t have to worry that your website will look bulky on smaller screens.

6. SEO 

Pre-made templates were often blamed for not being SEO-friendly. However, modern website builders offer built-in solutions for search engine optimization. If you choose WordPress template you usually get SEO plugin by Yoast within the admin panel that allows providing full on-page optimization of your website. You can optimize a website by yourself with a help of multiple SEO guides and tools available.

It’s only your choice - whether you need a custom or pre-made website template. Pay attention to your business needs (is it a website for personal use, for business, for charity etc.) and your target audience’s interests. Wisely count your budget and estimate how much time you have before a website launch (custom websites usually take extremely much time). And then make a right choice. 

About the Author:

Julia Blake is an experienced writer of many articles related to web design and development, usability, trends, inspiration, etc. She likes learning and sharing her knowledge with others. Follow her on Twitter.