A website solves a business problem. It is not just a page for people to find your phone number and address. It helps you gain more customers by engaging with them, by telling about yourself and your product. It ultimately helps you sell a proposition.
When people talk about you they tell a part of this and a part of that and a website puts it all together under a comprehensive study which is easy and delightful for people to find out.
Your website makes a pitch to your audience. It precedes your product or your service and in that sense it holds a great value.
A website template robs you off the ability to control these elements in your favor.

You are establishing yourself different from others who provide the same service as you. This is the reason a customer would pick you from the rest. And if your website is one medium for customers to connect with you then there’s no reason for it to look like a hundred other websites. The same template is used by hundreds of people because it is easy and cheap to work with. Go for easy and cheap if that is what you want.

“Website templates are a way to get away with hard work for cheap”.

A website has to adapt to your business requirements as and when you grow or change. You have to change with the time and test your ways to survive. A template does not provide enough room for you to do that. It will give one image of your business that lasts forever. For your website to be customizable and dynamic you need it to be designed from scratch.

The reason why templates won’t give your business any edge is because they lack the edge themselves. They’re popular and accessible at a very low cost to a large portion of market. They are highly generalized for a collection of similar businesses. For example: under Arts and Culture you can find a template for ‘a singer’. Now, John Mayer’s website will be very different from Britney Spears’ website. It is difficult for a template to accommodate the personality of a singer. It is safe to conclude that a template doesn’t take the business’s need into consideration.
Customers respond well to originality and authenticity and they can easily differentiate between your original work from copied. Your website is like a handshake, it will decide what conversation happens next between you and your customer. You can only hope they’ll find you interesting and wonderful if you use a template.

Abhishek Sharma
ColoredCow