Templates are great tools when developing a website that is easy to update and maintain. The internet is full of great looking templates and themes, sometimes even developed by recognized, award winning designers. Building a website from a template, theoretically can save a great deal of time and money.

But what if your ideas and information do not fit with the template layout? Are you able to modify the coding behind the site, to make it work the way you want? As easy as it may seem, sometimes is complicated even to insert a meta tag, to modify the title tag, to enlarge a text block or to insert a menu bar. Customizing a template(or a WordPress theme) requires knowledge and experience.

Many people are using free templates. Chances are that several websites are using the template you have chosen. Your site looks like a copy of several sites. To modify the color scheme, that works perfect for that particular template, you really need design skills. To insert great looking icons or images in your template, you need advanced knowledge of HTML, CSS and image editing. No mater how hard you try, the overall feel of the template will remain. Attention spans are very short and if you’re not grabbing your visitors attention in 2 to 3 seconds of getting onto your website they will move on. The last thing you need is that template feel.

When building a website you need advanced knowledge of SEO to create the proper website architecture in order to have the maximum exposure for search engines. If you don’t know how SEO works, your website will not have any visitors from search engines.

For some, a website template might be all that is required. For others, it is simply not worth it. If you want your website to have visitors, stand out in the increasingly competitive marketplace and have it’s own identity, you really need the help of a good web designer.