The woof and the warp weblog about web stuff.

Option 1, the template club.

In Joomla! land it is a very common practice to use a free template or become a member of a so called template club. A template club is a club of which you become a member after paying a monthly or annual fee. A member is given access to a variety of pre-designed templates that he or she can download and use.

• You can start fast.
• You can pick from many designs.
• You get a template with many features.
• It's relatively cheap.

• You have limited options to get exactly what you have in mind.
• They are build for the masses so they are usually packed with features you don't need.
• They are hard to tune besides changing a color or image.
• Most of them are image, html and css heavy, slow rendering.
• You could end up with the same template your competition is using.

Option 2, the custom build template.

A custom build template is something totally different. A template build especially for you and fitting your brand strategy. Custom templates are mostly unique and there are things possible that are simply to complicated for mass production club templates.

• There are basically no limits to make it fit your needs.
• They can be build ultra light and fast rendering.
• They are easy to tune or change.
• They can fit your brand appearance exactly.
• They are unique.
• They can grow with your site.
• They can be SEO optimized.

• It takes more time to build them.
• They require a larger investment money wise.

Decision making time.

Once you decide to start a website or update your existing site it is time to think about the needs and requirements (just looking at presentation level here). Questions like:

• Which message should my site send into the world?
• Do I have special needs?
• Does the site need to be build by using the latest web-standards?
• Is accessibility important to me or my visitors?
• Do I really need a template which can display in 30 different color schemes and with 20 collapsible module positions?
• Does it matter whether my site is unique?
• How long do I expect the design to be representing?
• Is SEO important to get the most out of my site?
• What is my budget?

My personal opinion.

If you are shooting for a fast site and branding isn't that important to you, go for a club template but make sure you try to customize it as much as you can to make it look different than your neighbour.

If you are a professional business taking yourself serious and if you want everyone else to see that at first glance you need to go for a professional custom template that represents your brand perfectly and is build to render fast, be accessible, usable and SEO optimized. The investment is a little higher in the beginning but in the longer run you will be more satisfied and more flexible to keep your site up to par with your growing business.