eCommerce Website Templates: Friend or Foe?
Creating a new ecommerce website can require a lot of time, energy, resources, skills of HTML and CSS, and know how to get started and set up. Using a website template can expedite the process saving a lot of time and money.
The down side of using a template is knowing that there are a lot of other websites out there that will have a similar design. Another consideration, that will elucidate what decision is right for you, is whether or not you need a customized website or have needs beyond what a free or a low paid template can satisfy.
The majority of eCommerce platforms will provide many options for their customers with ecommerce website templates that quite often create the best ecommerce websites. Those options are most often free or paid. The free templates are more likely to be templates that a lot of websites already are using. This makes being original a very tough task.
Shorter Development Time
One of the major reasons people put themes into consideration when building a website is that it saves a lot of time on development and costs. The time it spends to make a website is a two-step process when making a website from a template. You will only have to deal with the design and front-end coding.
Furthermore, if you know exactly what the final product should look like then you will only have to configure your elements and install the design. Finally, test the website before you go live.
Trends in Template Design
No matter if the template is free or paid, all of the templates should have a high level of functionality already coming standard. The high availability of wonderful designs is endless, due to the fact that there are number of authors being able to make a good living off website themes.
Furthermore, they should be offering cross-over browser design that makes your website compatible with any type of device. Also the templates should be able to load very fast on any device. Part of Google’s ranking assessments is whether or not a website loads quickly so it is very important to make sure you have a template that allows all your content to load quickly.
Plugins
One of the upside of using templates (custom or template designs) is being able to customize and install multipurpose plugins that will help give more functionality to your website.
Remembering that sometimes when you install way too many plugins you will slow down your website and your free template. The excessive code that comes with having so many plugins can become a nightmare in trying to make sure your website is running properly.
To conclude using a template is not about whether or not there is a low cost or ease it is whether or not your business needs a custom website. Making the right decisions for your business is up to you and your founders.
Obviously making the cheaper decision is always preferable so exploring templates should be high on your priority list.
