Is the company or individual you are about to hire a legitimate web design or development firm or person? Or are they just template builders that charge excess fees for changing out content on a template based design.
As an open source content management system, WordPress has become one of the most popular FREE CMS frameworks out there. And in it’s popularity it has evolved into a major template revolving platform. And with it’s vast options for buying templates, there are companies out there that claim to be web design companies or firms that are buying templates for $50 and charging $1200-$2500 for swapping out the photos in the template, the logo, and putting their name at the bottom saying created by them.
If you are paying $2,500 for a custom site that is built on a WordPress Framework, you would hope that you are getting a custom design and custom code. But beware of the companies that know nothing about web design or code, and call themselves self proclaimed web designers or developers.
I call these types, the template monsters. I have had many clients come to me with horror stories of dropping $1,200 or $2,000 on a custom website that was built on WordPress but in the end the hired company or individual was not able to give them the customization or functionality they wanted. Mostly because the so called web design company didn’t know anything about code and couldn’t deviate from the template that they purchased. Templates limit the creative or design freedom. And often times one small adjustment of it’s layout can break the whole site. This is why it is much more efficient to get a full custom site that is flexible to fit the client’s needs. And for $2,500 you should be getting a site that is customized to fit your needs as a company or client.
The other thing that is happening behind the scenes with most of these templates is excess code. Templates are made with the intention of trying to be flexible and have tons of built in code or options that usually will never, ever be used. And what happens is you end up with all the excess code on your site that doesn’t get used but slows down the time it takes for you site to load and slows down the whole entire site. A more refined, clean, custom code will not bog your site down. Which is another reason to stay away form these template monsters. If you are sacrificing your load time you are creating a bad user experience for your website visitors.
Visit my spotting a wordpress template blog post to learn how you can find out if the company you are about to hire is a template monster.