By Julia Jackson

What is a Website Template?

Many smart and savvy businesses are choosing to use a website template, and avoiding employing a professional designer. Why? Well, there are clear benefits: saving on cost, saving on time, and ensuring quality.

Web templates close gap between amateur website owner learning to create his/her own website, and a one-off custom design.

What is a website template? A web template is a ready-made design for your website, including images, some navigation, preferably several sample pages and in some cases Flash animation. However, it has no content related to you or your business – that must come from you! Remember that a web template must be customized / modified (to whatever degree you are comfortable with) to turn it into your very own website.

What about hiring a website designer, or using a quick-and-easy tool to build your own website?

The answer to this question is easy – your, and your business’, professional image. There is no other way to say this - if you do not have appropriate web / Internet design experience, don’t put together a quick and dirty website and expect it to be a professional portrayal of you / your business!

So then do you have to spend a lot of money having a website custom designed for you? Well, you could. But you no longer need to!

A low-cost, but professional design

While selecting a ready-made web design template, you will probably browse through a collection of different website designs until you find one (or a few) that you like.

Expect to be able to at least see a screen capture of what your web page will look like, and hopefully a “see-in-action”– which lets you see exactly what you will be getting.

Choose your template carefully, and you will have a professional design, executed by a qualified designer with all due attention to accessibility, standards compliance, browser quirks and a lot of other things that you would not want to have to learn about from scratch, yourself! All for a fraction of cost of hiring a custom website designer or design firm.