Insight1 min read
Why I don’t use templates
A site builder saves three weeks and costs you recognisability. Why I don’t make that trade, and when it still makes sense.
There is a good reason site builders are so successful: they work. In three days you have a page, it is responsive, it has a contact form. For many people that is exactly right, and I say so honestly when someone comes to me with that need.
The price just isn’t the amount on the invoice. The price is that your site looks like ten thousand others. The same layout, the same spacing, the same imagery. Visitors do not notice it consciously, but they don’t remember anything either.
Then there is the technical side: a site builder has to be able to do everything, so it loads everything. Two megabytes of JavaScript for a page with four paragraphs. That costs load time, it costs visibility, and on a phone in a dead zone it costs you the visitor.
Hand-coded pages load what they need. Nothing more. That is not purism, that is arithmetic.
My rule of thumb: if you can afford to be interchangeable, take a site builder. There is no shame in that. If you can’t, let’s talk.