Do Professional Web Designers Use Templates?

Using templates to create a website is often regarded as something only beginner-level web designers would do. But that is not always the case, as some professional web designers use templates to increase their productivity.

Professional web designers commonly use templates for small projects that do not require heavy customisations. They also use it as a mockup to help clients better understand their complex web design ideas. Best of all, templates can help web designers work with greater efficiency.

To Use or Not to Use Templates

First, let’s define what templates are to understand how they fit exactly into the web design process. By definition, a template is a pre-designed webpage where you can put your own images, videos and written content into.

You can then use the template to create a website without having the need to hire a professional web designer. Simply make a few adjustments, do some testing, and then you’re good to go. With that said, templates are perfectly suited for websites that require little or no coding.

Template Benefits

Templates offer a number of benefits that both inexperienced and experienced web designers can use to their advantage. For example, novices who want to learn how high-quality websites should look like can examine the coding used in a well-coded template.

For professional web designers who take on multiple small projects, templates can be a great time-saver. Instead of making designs from scratch, they can just use a template as the basic layout for a website and then customise and optimise it according to their client’s specifications.

Templates also serve as excellent visual aids especially for clients who may find it difficult to imagine how your creative ideas look like. If you want to show a client how the finished product should look like, you can use a template to communicate that clearly.

Templates are commonly used for small website projects, landing pages, and personal blogging sites. But templates have their own limitations, such as lack of flexibility. When your online business expands, you may find that your template restricts you from enhancing your website, especially when optimising it for performance and advanced SEO. In this case, custom-made web design is simply the better option.

Where To Find Templates

If you are a web designer wanting to explore web design templates, we suggest you check out these 3 template marketplaces that professional web designers use. These 3 marketplaces offer premium templates that can help make your website responsive and SEO-friendly. Some of these templates can also help improve the loading speed of your website.

1. Template Monster

Template Monster is known for its large collection of high-quality and SEO-friendly templates that are designed with users in mind Their unique and visually-appealing templates allow you to have a ready-made website that you won’t find anywhere else. However, the price range (A$100 to A$200 per template) may be a bit steep for users who are on a tight budget.

Their templates work perfectly with a variety of Content Management System (CMS) platforms, such as WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, Joomla, Magento, Prestashop, and many more. You can also find web templates for your landing pages, photo galleries, PowerPoint presentations, newsletters, eBay, and Adobe sites.

Lastly, Template Monster also offers adaptive and fluid mobile site templates so you will never have to worry about templates having a poor responsive design quality. These templates are built to respond accurately to multiple devices so your web visitors will have a seamless mobile user experience.

2. ThemeForest

Featuring more than 46,000 templates, ThemeForest is part of a large community of web designers called Envato Market. You can easily discover any web design that you’ll need for your website or landing page for as low as A$3. The starting price may seem too good to be true, but ThemeForest only sells well-coded templates, which is why many web designers prefer this marketplace over the others.

Many of their templates are compatible with WordPress, Shopify, Joomla, and more. However, you must check the design’s reviews and update history to make sure that you’ll only get an updated and secure template. A few designers also sell high-quality CSS, HTML5 and Drupal templates at affordable prices.

3. Rocket Theme

Rocket Theme is another good marketplace to find premium Joomla, WordPress, and Grav CMS templates and extensions. All templates are built from scratch and come with powerful features including responsive web design elements that lead to positive user experiences. Some templates also have dynamic CSS transitions and animations that bloggers love.

Lastly, because Rocket Theme has its own framework, the templates are very easy to modify and optimise for different search engine standards.

Important Considerations

Before you buy a template for your website, remember that other designers may be interested in the same template as you. The key to staying unique is to create a web design strategy that suits the unique needs of your business and customers.

We also recommend that you pick a template that allows some flexibility in terms of customising your site’s visual elements (e.g., colours, font style, and content layout, to name a few). Incorporate these specific elements into your template to make your brand stand out from the competition and express your brand’s unique identity to your target customers.

There are also platforms like WordPress that offer access to a tool that allows you to choose your own template and plugins to create a new website right away.

Work Faster with Templates

Templates help professional web designers work with greater speed and efficiency, but they are not created to replace custom-built web designs. It is also an affordable alternative to expensive custom-built designs, which makes it a perfect choice for business owners who are on a tight budget. Lastly, templates offer a number of benefits that increase any professional web designer’s productivity.