Designing a website today is not a simple task. It is crucial to find a unique place for your brand, in a crowded market landscape. A few years back, it was very simple to design and build a website with little efforts. Nowadays, it takes considerable time and thought. It is easy to fall into a trap of designing a website yourself without researching on design guidelines. These guidelines are meant to enhance UI aesthetics, usability and influence. People with such a mindset become hard task masters for web designers. It is really hard to meet their requirements and to collaborate with them. No doubt there are many strategies and technologies for designing a wonderful online presence. Even if you want to do it yourself, some guidance is necessary from web designers.

In order to help business owners to create their own website, web designers have come up with a great solution: templates.

A template is a pre-made website which is 80% complete and needs some personalizing and finishing according to your needs and requirements. Requirements can be of some sort of images, fonts, text, headings etc.

Now the question is: when there are a number of templates available on web, what are the criteria for short-listing the best one for your business?

Here are some important tips for selecting the right website template for your brand:

1. Decide the category of website

You should be very clear on the industry your business lies in and the target market. On that segregation, there are various do’s and don’ts which can be followed. For example, if you need an eCommerce website, then it should include high quality images, call to action button and a search option based on preferences. A corporate website should have creative design that impresses customers to go in their website and influence them to explore more pages and read their valuable content. A Kids website must be funny with full of colors and pictures that auto generate some sort of joy. So category plays an important role in selecting the appropriate template which should be decided first while building a website.

2. Choose the template based on your website category

Now based on category decided, selected template must fit the needs of category; it is not just selected on the basis of look and design. Our first preference must be the type of website we need. A right and effective template will work only if it is selected by the mind not just by feelings. Anyone who is selecting the template must have a purpose in mind that the template should be one that originate results and fulfill the user need. It is important to consider the objective in mind and my personal suggestion is to write down user expectations and then start browsing for templates. It must be a careful decision that template meets user requirements and also looks good.

3. Customize web Design template

Almost all website templates require some modifications to make it effective. In these modifications, we can include adding company logo, color and font selection and some sort of adding media items. A most importantly website design must be customized according to speed also. A good website should always performs fast downloading and be search friendly. Also, make sure before selecting the template that it supports all kinds of customization that you need. Customization is needed to enhance the performance of your website and it also gives the feeling of original website with no duplicity.

4. Analyze the customer needs

As we stated above that web is full of templates and it is not necessary that all the templates are according to your website. May be all of them are not useful for you or they demand a lot of customization. So if someone is really talented and cares about the online presence then it is necessary to keep in mind the users requirements and their needs. It means it must be user friendly and customer support is needed in it.

5. Keep in mind the Design Trend

Mostly people, who buy templates, feel that it will give better results. But results don’t necessarily lie on the financials. Results originate only with clarity and understanding of your customers; and quality. Choose only those templates that fit the identity of who you are. Design dictates brand perception. So, it is always recommended to use templates which are in trend and aligned with the intended brand perception.

Author : Priya is a Technical SEO at Hopinfirst, a leading mobile app development company which provide best ios app development and Android app development Services.