I have come across this too much lately. Clients and agencies both reverting to using a pre-made website template to represent their brand. This typically occurs when budget is a problem especially for a startup company. One major problem with this is that if budget is a concern then start off right in the first place. Too many times have clients come to us with a template site that simply doesn’t work. Here are the reasons I have found:

• The design doesn’t match your branding and customers were confused
• The template was not build for their content. The content had to be retrofitted to the design of the template
• There are licensing agreements with some templates that restrict what you can do with them or include their info on the site that show it’s a template
• Their developer had to understand the original programmers code to go in and make adjustments
• The template was actually built years ago and technology has changed
• The template broke when images or too much content was added to places that were not flexible
• Images were used on important items like the main navigation and links. Google doesn’t like that.
• Template designers are not SEO experts and most template sites are bad for SEO
• Many templates use Flash which Google can’t read and iPad and iPhone users can’t see. Also you can’t update the flash yourself and it’s a memory hog.
• Since images were used in the navigation this are has a fixed width and no other items could be added without design and development help
• Design and not functionality was the intent for the template so the user suffers
• Good user experience strategies were not employed and many unneccessary items needed to be moved or removed
• The whole template and all of the work done needed to be scrapped and the client wanted to start over the right way

Our recommendation is to not even use a template option as a quick fix at first. When you launch your brand it needs to represent your company and be designed with your content and good user experience in mind. Also as technology changes you want your site to be written the right way so that things don’t break. Using a great developer with current experience should be your goal.

Doing a quick fix template causes you more problems than it’s worth by giving you something that hundreds of other people could be potentially using too. Templates are also not very flexible and you end up spending more time trying to change one then if you had started with a fresh design in the first place. Just like hiring your brother in law to fix your roof, using a template will just cause you headache and you’ll end up redoing it anyway.

So many people come to us with a vision for their own brand based on what they’ve seen others doing. Your brand is unique to your company and needs to connect you to your audience. Just like copying someones website, copying a logo or using and old brand that hasn’t work is counterproductive.

We can help you rethink your brand and produce a logo that you can be proud of, that’s unique to your business and one that has a story behind it. People will remember the logo and tie it to your story much more so than a generic brand or something that is similar to another brand.

The simpler the better sometime. Your logo should look like a logo and not an illustration. Too many elements in a logo can obscure the message and make it difficult for your audience to remember. The simpler the better when creating a logo. It’s not finished when their is nothing more to add but when there is nothing more that you can take away and still understand the concept.

Take pride in your logo, have a professional work through the process with you and have a logo that’s as unique as your company.