Can Using Web Design Templates Derail Your Marketing Efforts?
by: Rasheed Ali
So, you’ve come up with a business idea and put your heart and soul into gathering capital, developing a product, or refining a service that you plan to offer. Now it’s time to get your business online with a web site. You may be tempted to save money by using a web design template, but what you may not know is that using a web template may defeat all of the marketing you have done and will continue to do in the future. Learning about this problem can save you wasted time and money and help you build a web site that you can market effectively.
Web Design Templates Lack Uniqueness
When people visit your web site, you want them to get a feel for your brand and feel comfortable doing business with your company. If they see that you have the same web design as 100 other web sites, they may come up with some unfavorable impressions about your business. One impression might be that your business is not doing well and you could not afford to get a unique design. Another might be that you’re not willing to put forth the money you need to make your business spectacular. Both of these are negative impressions and won’t help you keep visitors coming back to your site.
Web Design Templates Can Be Difficult to Use
If you bought a design template, the template may have some qualities that you want to get rid of. If you don’t know anything about web design, you may have a difficult time removing these qualities. Removing pieces of code may cause the web site not to work properly or may leave your site looking awkward. A site that looks bad or doesn’t work like it’s supposed to is not going to create a good impression with visitors.
Web Design Templates Can Be Overly Complex
Having a lot of useful information on your site is great, but people can’t find that information if they have to use difficult menus and navigate through link after link just to find one page. Some web design templates are very complex and don’t make the best web sites for business purposes. Don’t use one of these templates or you risk losing customers when they get confused or feel like they are wasting their time.
Web Design Templates Can Be Unattractive
Some free templates are designed by people who are getting started in web design and practicing their talents. Since these templates are often practice designs, they may have clashing color schemes, inappropriate fonts, or other characteristics that make them bad ideas for business use. Your web site should have a clean layout with few graphics and a lot of information that can be found easily. Using an unattractive template can lead visitors to believe that you don’t want to spend the time or money to create a good site.
Avoiding web design templates is the best rule of thumb when you are building your web site. Use your resources to work with an affordable designer who can help you design a web site that will keep visitors interested and create positive impressions instead of negative ones.
Make It Effective!
Remember, branding yourself and your business does not have to be expensive or fancy, just make it effective.
Learning as much as you can about direct response marketing as well as how the human mind responds to stimuli like colors, words and sounds, will serve as an extremely effective method of ensuring a solid foundation and your websites effectiveness.
Copyright 2006 Rasheed Ali
About The Author
Rasheed Ali is CEO and founder of the Internet Coaching Academy
http://www.InternetCoachingAcademy.com where he and his team of internet business experts are helping people from all over the world start, build and profit from their own internet business. He also offers a FREE newsletter and gives away a video course on building a home based business on the internet.
