Every few weeks someone gets in touch and says some version of the same thing: ‘we just need something simple, maybe a template, nowt fancy.’ And every few weeks we have the same conversation back. Not because we’re precious about it, and not because bespoke work pays better (it doesn’t always). It’s because a template can only ever get you to average, and we’ve never met a business owner who set out to build an average business.
So here’s the honest version of why we push back on templates, and when, if we’re being straight with you, a template is actually the right call.
A template is built for nobody in particular
That’s sort of the point of a template. It has to work for a plumber in Wakefield and a yoga studio in Brighton and a SaaS startup in Leeds, all at once, without any of them touching a line of code. To pull that off, every sharp edge gets sanded down. The layout, the pacing, the way content is structured, all of it gets designed around the lowest common denominator of ‘probably fine for most people.’
Which is exactly why so many template sites end up looking, well, the same. Same hero banner, same three-icons-in-a-row section, same stock photography of people laughing at laptops. Visitors have seen it a thousand times before they’ve even read your headline, and that familiarity is doing your brand no favours at all.
Bespoke design starts with a different question
When we design something from scratch, the first question isn’t ‘what does the template allow?’ It’s ‘what does this business actually need to say, and to whom?’ Sometimes that means a completely unconventional homepage layout. Sometimes it means throwing out navigation conventions because your customers don’t browse the way a template assumes they will. Sometimes, honestly, it means a fairly standard structure, because that’s genuinely what works best for what you’re trying to do.
The difference is that the decision gets made on purpose, not inherited from a theme file somebody built for a completely different business two years ago.
Templates get you to launch. Bespoke gets you to grow.
This is the bit that tends to land once people have lived with a template site for a year. It’s launched, it looks reyt nice on day one, and then reality sets in. You want to add a new service and there’s nowhere sensible to put it. You want a booking flow and the template’s booking plugin fights with three other plugins. You want the site to load in under two seconds on a phone and it’s carrying half a megabyte of CSS you’ll never use, because it was written for features you don’t have.
None of that is a design problem exactly. It’s an architecture problem, and templates aren’t built with your architecture in mind, they’re built with everyone’s architecture in mind, which in practice means no one’s.
Okay, but when is a template the right shout?
We’d rather tell you the truth than talk you into something bigger than you need. If you’re testing an idea before it’s properly funded, or you need something live this week for a specific event, a good template is a sensible tool. There’s no shame in that. The problems tend to show up later, when the temporary template site is still doing the day-to-day heavy lifting for the business two years down the line and starting to hold it back.
The real question isn’t template versus bespoke in the abstract. It’s whether the thing you’re building needs to grow, differentiate, and hold up to scrutiny, or whether it just needs to exist. Most businesses we work with are further along than they think, and a template quietly caps what they can do next.
What bespoke actually costs you (and gives back)
We won’t pretend bespoke is cheap, because it isn’t, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either underselling the work or overselling the template. What you’re paying for is someone actually thinking about your business rather than fitting it into a box. That shows up in load times, in how the site handles on mobile, in how easily your team can add new pages down the line, and in whether a visitor remembers your brand five minutes after they’ve left the site.
Give us a bell if you want a proper, no-nonsense chat about which route makes sense for where you’re at. We’ll tell you if a template will do you fine, we promise.
