Why we say no to templates

A client asked us last week why we do not "just use a nice template and adapt it". Fair question. Templates are cheap, they look polished in the demo, and half the web runs on them. Here is the honest answer.

A template is an answer to a question you didn't ask

Every template was designed for an imaginary business: "a modern agency", "a restaurant", "a creative studio". The layout, the sections, the order of things — all decided for that imaginary business. When you pour your real business into it, one of two things happens. Either you bend your story to fit the boxes, or you spend more time fighting the template than it would have taken to build the right thing.

The demo always looks great. It was designed around its own demo content.

The tax you pay forever

Templates ship with everything, because they have to sell to everyone. Six header styles, four sliders, a portfolio module, a shop module, three icon sets, animation libraries — all loaded on every page, whether you use them or not. That is why template sites are slow and stay slow. You cannot remove the weight without breaking something, so you carry it.

Then the updates. The template updates, the plugins it depends on update, and one Tuesday the header is broken and the person who "adapted" it is on holiday.

Everyone looks like everyone

You will recognise the popular templates once you know them: the same hero, the same three-column features, the same testimonial slider. Visitors recognise them too, without knowing why. A site that looks like the last four sites they saw does not feel like a business that does things properly.

What we do instead

We start with your four words and your one job, and we design a page that says them. Then we build it by hand, with exactly what it needs and nothing else. It costs more at the start than a template. It costs less every month after that, and it is yours — no licence, no theme author in Bangalore or Berlin who can stop maintaining it.

When a template is the right call

When you are testing an idea and need a page tonight. When there is no budget and no budget coming. When the site genuinely is a one-page placeholder until the real thing. In those cases use a good template, keep it simple, and plan to replace it. We will tell you that to your face rather than sell you a build you do not need yet.

For everything else — a business with customers, a reputation, a plan to grow — start from a blank page. It is the only page that was designed for you.