A good website is essential for businesses. It is often the first contact a potential customer makes with your business, and is therefore your chance to make a good first impression.
Creating an effective website often starts with choosing the right website template. It is worth taking your time over this to ensure you choose the best one for your brand.
Fit for purpose
Before choosing a template, be very clear about your business goals. If you are a small business, it may be that the primary goal of your website is to convert to sales, while a freelancer will want one that highlights their CV and showcases work. If you are creative, such as an artist or photographer, consider one that best displays the images of your work.
Types of templates
There are many parts to a website and differences in design. You will need to decide on whether you want static or dynamic, depending on whether you need your site to update automatically. You will also need to choose between a simple single-page or a more complex multi-page design, and whether you need it to be responsive or adaptive to different devices.
Some of these aspects are more complex than others, so you may need to consider professional web design. When choosing a designer, look for one with experience in the type of website you require. For example, if you are looking for Shopify web design, you might consider etempa.co.uk/shopify-web-design.
Website layout
Another aspect that will affect which template you choose is the website layout. There are many options to choose from, including Z-pattern, F-pattern, asymmetrical, full-screen image, and split-screen layouts.
You will also need to consider what other elements you want, such as types of headers and footers, menus, and what you will be featuring on the site, such as text, images, video boxes, and carousels. Other aspects you may want to include are links to social media, events, and reviews.
Once you are clear on what your website needs, you can choose a template that will incorporate it.
Responsive design and simple navigation
Whichever template you choose, check how it behaves on every device your customers use. Many people will reach your site on a mobile phone rather than a laptop, and a layout that breaks or becomes hard to read on a small screen sends them straight to a competitor. A good template should resize cleanly and keep buttons, text and images usable at any width.
Navigation deserves the same scrutiny. It is tempting to put every piece of information in front of visitors, but crowded menus, sidebars packed with links and long lists of posts make a site harder to use. Think about how customers will actually move through your pages and keep only the essential elements. Colours and fonts should match your brand while staying easy to read. Doing some research before you commit to a design also lets you plan your content properly, which helps the site perform better in search results over time.
When a template is not enough
Drag and drop builders mean almost anyone can publish a website in a few hours, and for a small brochure site that may be all you need. But if the website will be a serious marketing tool, a template has limits. A business site needs to reflect what makes the brand different, and a template is unlikely to match the loading speed of a purpose-built site or compete as well on search.
Good search optimisation is not something added once the build is finished. The strongest results come when it is built into the structure of the site from the start, so the strategy needs to be clear from day one.
User experience should shape every decision, based on research into how visitors want to interact with the brand. Content matters just as much: attractive images and graphics will not keep people on a page if the copy is thin. Visitors are looking for valuable information, so every page should be relevant and interesting enough to bring them back. These are good reasons why a professional build takes longer.