Starting your own website is an essential part of almost every business venture. It is quite impossible to imagine a successful company without a professionally-looking homepage. There is one major issue here – building it on your own takes a lot of time even if you are a pro, and it means that you are sacrificing precious time,that can be used on any other business activity. So, if you don’t want to bother, there are two options – hire a web designer to build the site from a scratch or use a pre made template. If your business is growing, the cost of making a custom website might be damaging. The time is also an issue, since this process can be quite long, what makes the advantages of templates even more obvious for a small company. The professionally-made web templates will cost you about $50 or less and are available on demand. Here I’ve picked up some tips to help you choose the appropriate one.
- Choose the right web design. The design of your website has to be specific, and you should know exactly who your target audience is, and what is your niche. This will determine the corporate colors, style and structure. Don’t rely on your vision only – you have to look on a website with your client’s eyes. Remember, that the website has to match the customers expectations. Look for easily readable layouts, icons and fonts.
- Choose between Flash and HTML. The Flash-based template might have a quite amazing look, but it has its drawbacks. First of all, they take much more time to load – it may be a problem for some of your customers. They are also hardly customizable, so it will be hard to get the unique look. What’s also important is that the websites based on Flash go pretty bad with SEO (search engine optimization), because there are no traditional tags and keywords. On the other hand, HTML-based templates are much faster, flexible and SEO-friendly. They are much easier to maintain, since they don’t require any special knowledge but the HTML itself.
- Check the flexibility of a template. The more customization options template has, the more unique features you’ll be able to add in it. The code should be understandable easily, in order to choose the colors, background, fonts, etc. A good template can be personalized to an almost custom-website degree. What is also important is to check how the template looks on different browsers – even small errors may cause your website look bad.
- Look for a template with the special features. If you are going to run a business site, it is very likely you’ll need them. These usually include: the ability to add plugins, special navigation bar, video or audio support, advertising, etc.
- Watch out for the images. Some templates use too much images that can slow down your website dramatically. Also, the standard images are hard to customize, since they are built in a code. Usually it is better to choose more simple template and add your own images instead – they are much easier to optimize anyway.
Choosing the proper web template may take some time, but it’s totally worth it. Make a research on your clients, maybe even make a small survey – and you’ll have the idea what they expect. Also keep in mind that the template has to look as unique as possible, so it’s always a good idea to customize it accordingly. Do you have more tips to add? Don’t hesitate to leave them in comments below.
Author’s Bio
Post by Martin Lindon – a PR and marketing manager at http://www.rickyswebtemplates.com/, a widely-known online destination for premium and free HTML and Flash templates.