For a long time now, Content Management Systems (CMS) have been the normal way to build and manage a brand’s website. Within the world of CMS there are LOTS of options. You can use Drupal, Joomla, Dot Net Nuke or WordPress to name a few, or you can let your website needs determine your choice (if you want e-commerce to play a major role, then you might go with Magento, Volusion, or Shopify). Each system has its own benefits and drawbacks. And one thing that has become ubiquitous in all of these systems and may seem really enticing is the option of paying a small fee (or nothing at all) for a website design template .

It’s easy! download a template, upload it to my hosted CMS and voila! A professional looking website in minutes. All I have to do is write the content to fit my company. As I warned in my recent article on stock photography, this affordable option sounds great but just makes you one of the masses. Take a look before you download and use a template; a lot of the theme development/sale sites will post how many times a theme has been purchased or downloaded.

Do you want to run the risk that there are over 10,000 other sites with the same design as yours? This doesn’t mean that there is not a use for these templates. They do a great job of providing a basic framework and functionality for a specific CMS that you can then heavily customize to fit your brand. And when I say heavily customize, I mean don’t leave anything the same. Change colors, fonts, and especially images and copy. Templates and CMS can save you big on programming, but they should by no means provide you the design and content of your brand.