When you think of developing a website or redesigning an old website into new one, you can get a thought of buying a web design theme. A readymade web design theme is like buying a readymade tuxedo for yourself. You can make some alterations but you can’t create it from scratch.
Price for web design theme ranges from couple of dollars to thousands of dollars. This depends on various factors such as the design of the theme, features offered in the theme, type of theme (responsive design, parallax design, etc.) and many more that you may want for your website.
Pros and Cons of buying a web design themes
Pros of buying a web design themes:
1. Fast and inexpensive
A web design theme can easily be found, purchased and deployed. Placing content and publishing it can be done within few days. A basic web design theme or a web design template can cost you few dollars, of course the price increases with features of the website.
2. Simple and easy to use
A web design template is simple and easy to use. You don’t have to be a professional in understanding and working how things go around on a web design template.
3. Completely designed and coded
The web design theme you choose is already designed by the designer and web developer did his part executing complexities to make it easy for you.
4. Easy to change
You can change anything about the web design in the template. Change header size, image size, post page, font family, font size, etc.
Cons of buying a web design themes:
1. Limited areas to expand
Designing the website from pre-designed web themes give you little space to spread the wings of your brand’s ideas and goals. You will have to be content with what you are getting out of it. You cannot make a huge change to the website design by yourself.
2. Less choice of customization
You will have very less number of choices when you think of changing certain thing about the website. The choices for landing page, other pages or post page type will be decided for you as it is given by default in the web design theme. You get what you see and buy. Tweaking something on the web design of the template can end up changing the entire layout of it.
3. No design process
You can’t sit with the designer, telling him how you want your website to look like and how it should feel when the user is browsing it. A web design theme does what it shows to you. A readymade web design theme will only let you do some tweaks to its design. In some premium themes, you have to make extra payments in order to make extensive changes to the design.
4. Not unique
One of the major drawbacks of buying a web design template is that it is not unique. The website design should speak about you and your brand or business to your users and consumers. The design should be exclusive and not something used by others on the web. A custom design will help you design an exclusive website that you or your company can use.
5. Not so much SEO
Even though most of the web design themes say they are SEO friendly but in reality they are not. A premium web design theme or template works on a specific software to change things on the backend. You don’t get to have much liberty on optimizing the website as you would do to a custom designed website.
6. Finding support
If you are not a person who knows how to work things out on a web design theme then it will be really difficult for you to understand the language of the manual or steps guide. Contacting a support team will add extra amount of time to what you are doing. It may take you several hours to make a tiny change on the website as there is a possibility of the support team being in a whole different time zone than you.
Buying a web design theme is easy and fast but the disadvantages make it a bad decision in long term. You cannot make changes to a website’s design frequently. The changes made on the design hamper the Google ranking, search results and in some cases losing the credibility of the website and the brand on the whole.