Your business is unique. Your website should be too.

Many web design firms offer a very low-cost option for small business websites. How do they do it? By using a standard template and “plugging in” your business name and vitals. The upside is the cost. But the downside can be devastating for your brand identity.

You find them all over the web: templates you can use to get a website off the ground fast. Very often, web design firms will also use these common templates to make cheap “starter” websites for customers. The more adventurous firms will even make their own templates for reuse.

The reason for this is cost. It takes less time for the design firm to create and deploy your site, therefore it costs the customer less money for the product. But is it worth the corner cutting?

At Heideldesign, we never use a cookie-cutter template to design a client website. Why? The answer is simple. Our clients are unique. They work very hard to differentiate their products and services from the competition. Our clients deserve websites that emphasize their brand and strategy, with custom functionality that cannot be pre-determined. These base-level templates do nothing to elevate the status of our clients in their fields. In fact, they can often do more harm than good.

Reasons to stay away from web site templates:

1. Quality of design.
Generic templates focus on the lowest common denominator. They need to house spreadsheets or photographs as easily as prose. To do that, they are often very simple designs with little to no room for customization.

2. Brand reinforcement.
Companies work very hard to have unique, easily recognizable logos, tag-lines and printed materials. Why dilute your brand with a website that doesn’t have the same level of thought and consideration? Do Gateway and Dell have the same websites? Of course not. With cookie-cutter templates, you and your competition might have the same site. Having a custom website is a sure-fire way to distinguish yourself from your peers.

3. Professionalism.
Generic, template-based websites are not a professional representation of your company. Cost should never be the only factor in developing a web presence. Plan ahead, save the necessary funds, and have the site designed by a professional. You and your clients will immediately recognize the benefit and impact of a custom website.