Today, you do not need to be a web design expert or have advanced programming skills to create a good-look and competitive website. Thanks to ready-made website design templates, you can launch a website that can easily compete with custom-made solutions by expert web design agencies. Besides, launching a website with a ready-to-go website template takes less time than building every single page from scratch. There are many other advantages of working with ready-made web design solutions. There is a wide choice of such products available for free or paid download on different websites and marketplaces. Considering the abundance of ready-made themes, how can you decide which of them should be the best pick for you? That’s exactly what we are going to discuss in this article.
What type of website are you building?
You should make the first and foremost decision before looking for the best website design templates. It seems an obvious recommendation, but many people forget about it when they begin their search. One should not build a website only to design and code its pages. It’s vital to create a website focusing on the needs and expectations of your customers. Choosing a website template that simply looks nice is not enough. You need to find a web design solution that looks striking and features all the required functionality to make your website look and feel spectacular.
What are your web design preferences?
Choosing the best web design for your website is closely related to the abovementioned point. Once you know what kind of web project you’d like to launch, you can easily find the best web design solution to match its style.
As a rule, business and corporate websites feature clean and minimalist designs. Entertainment online projects should look more eye-catching, featuring web designs with stunning animations and other attention-grabbing effects. Launching an eCommerce website, you should put usability the focus of your attention.
What functionality should your website have?
Picking a ready-made web theme that already features all or most of the needed functionality for your website significantly facilitates and speeds up your website’s launch. Most of the ready-made themes available on the modern web come pre-loaded with all the essentials suited for niche-specific topics.
If you launch a personal blog, you need to find the best website design templates featuring commenting systems, social sharing options, contact forms, and other functionality that should help you improve communication with your readers and get feedback from them. Suppose it’s an eCommerce site that you want to bring online. In that case, you need to find a ready-to-go web design with smart product filters, usable search, intuitive and quick checkout, seamless integration with all popular online payment systems, etc.
Free vs. premium website design templates
There is no shortage of ready-to-go web design solutions on the modern web. Today, you can easily find well-built free and premium web design assets that can perfectly match your business and industry.
You need to consider several things when choosing between free and premium web themes.
Cost is a major concern for many. However, the price you pay for a ready-to-go web design also means investing in the time and effort you apply to launch your website. Would you prefer to spend your time on design and development tasks, or you’d better spend more time on improving your product? Website templates ready to be brought online straight out of the box and do not suggest that you apply much effort to their customization are commonly available under a premium license.
If you decide to go with a free website template, you should be ready it might lack the needed functionality, and you would need to pay to download those. Also, such web design might lack premium support and come with designs of poor quality. Premium web themes commonly feature code polished to perfection, reliable technical support, and bundles of integrated features, among many other things. Premium templates let you spend less time on website creation, thus allowing you to focus more on your project.
It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider using free website templates. There are many good examples of such ready-to-go web design solutions. However, if you feel serious about reaching impressive results with your projects, a paid web theme is more likely to help you achieve your goals. A free website template is better to be used for educational purposes.
Take your time
We know you might feel super excited about launching your website. However, you should not pick the first template you find and launch your website on its basis. Launching a successful online project requires a certain time and a full understanding of what steps you need to take to build an online project that makes a difference.
Choosing a poor template might bring you more disappointment than you think. At some point, you might even encounter a situation when you need to start over again. To avoid this, take your time and be patient in choosing the best website design template for your project.
Pay attention to customization options
You will hardly leave the design and functionality of the chosen website design templates as-is. You will need to apply some changes to adjust it to reflect your brand’s identity as much as possible.
To make your website stand out, theme providers create website templates with various customization options. However, others don’t care much about integrating their products with flexible customization features. If you a not much of a web developer, you might not need many customization options to build a more complicated website. However, you need to keep an eye on the future. You might need to update your website with several non-default elements. That’s when flexible customization options should come in handy.
Go mobile-first
It’s essential to make your website look stunning on all desktop and handheld devices. Moreover, choosing mobile-first web designs is way more important on the modern web. If your website looks and works great on small screens, it should perform equally well across other types of devices and screen sizes.
Opt for SEO-friendly website design templates
You need to make your website more findable in search engines. This is why you cannot go without an effective SEO strategy. Opting for an SEO-friendly website template, you can launch a website that will rank higher in search engines and make your website more findable for the target audience.
Updates
The availability of lifetime updates is an important factor. Thanks to updates, your website will always remain safe and malware-resistant. It will be always compliant with the latest version of the engine powering your website. Rather than that, your website will always remain up-to-date.
Customer support
It’s another reason you’d better opt for paid website design templates. Most freebies lack customer support. Paid web themes, on the other hand, commonly include professional technical support. Thus, you can always rely on the expert team’s help whenever you need to apply any kind of changes to the chosen website template.
Wrapping up
Choosing the best website design templates is half of the deal when you want to build a competitive and multi-functional website that would perfectly match your brand identity. There are many factors worth taking into account during the decision-making. Do not hurry up with your choice. Pick a website template that will help you grow and improve in the future. The Availability of advanced customization options and lifetime updates to your website would perfectly meet your demands and reflect your expectations. It’s not only the design that matters. Pay attention to the functionality and the possibility of expanding the features set of the website template you choose for your website.