How To Best Choose A Design Template For Your New Website

When we choose a design template, we want it to suit our purpose. The details are critical, so we want to make the best possible decision. Selecting the right theme, in the beginning, can save us a lot of time and aggravation when we make a website. Below are some suggestions on how to choose a design template for your new website.

What Is The Purpose?

These days we can use a website for just about anything. The purpose can range from a simple blog all the way up to a modern business site. There are shopping carts, membership sites, and plain old information sites. Consequently, it behooves us to consider the function or purpose before selecting a template. In the end, this will save us plenty of time. Who wants to go back just add or delete specific features? It is true that adding features have gotten easier over the years thanks to the use of plug-ins. However, we want to limit plug-in usage for a variety of reasons. This subject is for another post.

Select The Proper Colors

Choosing the right colors is vital to the success of your website. According to the folks at KissMetrics, there is an entire psychology behind choosing the correct colors. They say colors can influence our emotions by communicating with a part of the brain known as the hypothalamus. When this happens, the pituitary gland works on the endocrine system to release hormones. The effect causes certain emotions, which result in specific behaviors. They claim 85% of people make choices about products based on color. I suppose the car manufacturers have known this for years.

Choose The Proper Layout

It is no longer adequate to determine which side of the page to put the sidebar. In fact, many website owners are moving away from having a sidebar unless they are presenting something like a blog. Most blogs need a sidebar for navigational purposes. With that said, mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular. That means website layouts should now conform to many different screen sizes. In response to this dilemma, webmasters are moving away from complex designs and moving more toward single page layouts without a sidebar. This decision only makes good sense. Single page designs will improve responsiveness, which means they can easily scale to the right screen size.

Customization

Website templates have become very popular since the onslaught of Web 2.0. The use of templates makes it much easier to create site-wide changes and customizations. What once took hours to change now takes minutes thanks to programming languages like PHP. However, not all website templates are created equal. It is vital to look at what customizations are available within the template.

Unless you are creating your theme, you will have to rely on the features that the creator is incorporating into his or her template. Not having the right elements can severely limit your ability to change resources if you do not know PHP coding. Therefore, it is smart to look at all the customization features before selecting any website template.

SEO Strategy

One of the most often overlooked aspects of selecting a website template is SEO. What good does it do spending many hours creating the perfect website only to have it do poorly with the search engines? These days poorly written code can have a negative impact on your site’s search-engine optimization. Please do not allow the price to influence this decision. There are many competent website programmers out there, and they are giving away templates. Alternatively, there are many bad programmers out there, and they will charge money for their templates. So let the buyers beware.

Here is where it pays to do some homework. Numerous factors can and will affect SEO. Among the top three factors are page load time, screen responsiveness, and being mobile friendly. To a large degree, these three categories depend on how the efficient the program is. Therefore, when selecting a theme make sure it has a quality source code. In the end, the website will be more successful.

Uniqueness

The search engine giant Google crawls roughly 30 trillion web pages at a rate of 100 billion times every month. This sheer size of the Internet is nearly unimaginable. It is why Google is deploying new technologies and artificial intelligence to help make sense of it all. However, it is easy to see how websites can begin to all look the same. Many of them have the same information in a different format. That is why it is a good idea to find and use a unique template. Get one that sets you apart from the pack. It can go a long way toward creating a successful website.

Security Concerns

Website security is something that is deficient for decades. We are finally beginning to see some updates to the old SSL protocols. As webmasters, we should be making a conscious effort to select our templates based on the securely written code. This concept goes hand-in-hand with the well-written code for SEO. In the future, we will begin to see websites penalized by the search engines for bad code.

There is another important reason to find a secure template. Anyone who has had their website hacked knows how frustrating it can be. That goes double if there are no backups or if the backup they own no longer functions. Many people have lost hundreds of hours of work due to security flaws in their template. It only makes sense to have a template made by a good PHP programmer. Using a quality web hosting company helps as well.

These are only a few tips to consider when you make a website. The first two factors will be to address the website’s purpose and its security. Next comes, scalability, flexibility, and responsiveness. Features like colors and SEO are also essential. Doing a little preliminary homework now can save a lot of trouble in the end when choosing a design template for your new website.