Why Your Template is Important

Do remember: household-name companies expect people to visit because of the name and in spite of dreadful websites. Can you afford that luxury? 

Nick Kew, Web Expert

If you’re a household-name company, then maybe you don’t need to worry about people finding your website and spending time there. Big companies really do get web traffic no matter what they do for a website. If you’re like most people, however, you’re not that famous and you do need to take advantage of the best practices in web design and development to make a site that’s easy to find and easy to navigate. That’s where having a well-developed template, whether it’s custom designed or “off the rack,” comes into play.

Putting together your template comes at the point in the development process where all the decisions have been made about how your website will work and what it will look like. So template-making time is when we roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty and get your project rolling!

Well, our hands don’t really get dirty and we usually wear short sleeves, but you get the idea.

Templates Make Changes Simple

The template is the design source for all of the pages on your website. It can be custom designed or it can come from a selection of a plethora of pre-made templates. The template specifies just how each page on your website should appear in web browsers:

• Layout (header, navigation, body, footer, etc)
• Typeface and formatting (heading, sub-headings, general content)
• Colors and image layout

Using a properly formatted template, your pages look uniformly terrific and future design changes are as simple as altering one page (the template) instead of every individual page. This is a tremendous advantage for sites that contain many pages, especially e-commerce.

Standards Compliant is the Way to Go

A bad template, one that doesn’t follow the latest (and upcoming) web standards, wastes all the work you did in getting a website started. You want a search engine friendly website, one with standards compliant pages that help search engines focus on your content. So we only use or create standards compliant templates that include the most recent techniques for making pages search engine friendly, because if your site doesn’t speak Google, you might as well not bother.

We can’t guarantee that your website will make you a household name, but we can assure you that the template you use will look and work like you’re famous.