Template or custom website? When each one is the right call

I build custom websites for a living, so you'd expect me to say templates are bad. They aren't. For a lot of businesses a good template is exactly the right call, and talking someone out of it just to sell a bigger project is a bad way to start working together.

When a template is plenty

You're testing an idea and don't know yet if it will last. You need something online by next month. Your customers find you through recommendations and only check the website for your phone number and opening hours. Your budget is small and would be better spent on photos.

In all of those cases a clean template, good photos and clear text will do the job. Spend the money on the photos.

When a template quietly costs you

It gets expensive when your website is where people decide whether to trust you. Ateliers, studios, coaches, restaurants, anyone selling something that's partly a feeling. If your site looks like the site of three competitors, you've just made yourself interchangeable, and interchangeable usually means "whoever is cheaper".

A template makes you look like everyone else who chose that template.

The other cost is hidden in the details. Templates are built to cover every possible business, so they carry features you'll never use, which makes them slower. They also make the easy things easy and the specific things painful. The moment you want your booking flow or your menu to work slightly differently, you're fighting the template.

What custom actually means

Custom doesn't have to mean experimental. It means the design starts from your content and your customers, not from a layout someone made for a generic business. The typography fits your tone. The page order follows how your customers think. The site loads only what it needs.

On projects like Nicole Woldrich's coaching site, the whole design came out of her photos and her way of talking. No template would have known that the right move was to slow everything down.

The middle ground

There's an option most people don't hear about: a custom design on a simple, well-known system. You get a look and structure made for you, built on technology that any developer can maintain later. You're not locked to me, and you're not stuck with a theme that thousands of other sites use.

A quick way to decide

Ask yourself: if a potential customer opened your website and a competitor's website side by side, should they feel a difference? If the answer is no, take the template and save your money. If the answer is yes, a template can't give you that difference, by definition.

And if you're still unsure, write to me. I'll tell you if a template is enough, and I'd rather lose a project than build one you didn't need.