If you don’t know what 100110101001111010 means and you don’t have a couple thousand dollars to hire a professional, using a template to design your website is probably your best option.  Templates are cheap and easy to use.  However, if not customized correctly, they can look unprofessional and unmemorable.  The following are tips on customizing your template to build the best possible website for your online business.

Choosing A Template:

1.Features

Choose the appropriate template to begin with: you don’t want to spend hours tweaking before you realize the one you’ve got won’t suit your needs.  Make a list of all the features your website needs to have (shopping cart, drop-down menus, search bar, etc.) and ensure that your prospective template has these capabilities.

2.Avoid Excess

You want your template to be as simple as possible, so avoid those loaded with features you’ll never use like flash animation.

3.See the potential

When searching for a template, you don’t need to find one that already looks exactly like you want it to – that’s the point of customizing.  Images, colors and fonts can all be altered.  The important thing is that your template comes with the right bones.

4.Look for CSS

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) based templates are usually easier to alter and customize.  With CSS, document presentation is separate from document content which allows you more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics.  In non-geek speak, this means you can alter aspects of your template without screwing the whole thing up.

Customizing Your Template:

The following are things you will need to alter on your template:

1.Logo

Your logo should be located at the top of your Homepage.  Your logo is your business name and/or symbol.  For instance, if you are operating a cosmetics website, your logo might be your business name “Beauty Star” with your symbol of a tube of lipstick on top of a star.

2.Photographs

Your homepage and all other pages need photographs.  On you product pages, these will be photographs of your products.  On other pages like your Contact Us Page and Homepage, they will probably be stock photographs.  It’s important that you purchase these photographs from a unique source.  DO NOT simply use the photographs already displayed on your template, because a dozen other people have already done that.  In the last month I’ve visited five or six websites carrying the same photograph of a blond college girl holding a stack of books.  I would never buy anything from those sites because I can tell they were thrown together in five minutes without attention to something as simple as the photograph on their Homepage.  The worst part is, the college girl doesn’t even have anything to do with their products – they’re selling things as diverse as pool inflatables and perfume.  For our hypothetical cosmetics website, we might purchase a stock photograph of a woman undergoing a relaxing spa treatment, or maybe use a large picture of one of the most popular cosmetics products.

3.Colors and Font

Just like you need to change the photographs on your template, you also need to alter the colors and fonts.  This accomplishes two purposes: it makes your website unique, and it allows you to optimize your site to best sell your products.  For my cosmetics site I might change the background to a relaxing green and make the font slightly more feminine.

4.Links

One of things you’ll choose on your template is how many webpages your site has (product pages, article pages, etc.) so you will have to alter the navigation links on your Homepage to reflect these pages.  (The navigation links are the buttons on your toolbar).  Keep in mind, you don’t have to organize your pages in the manner suggested by the template.  If you want the Contact Page to be first on your toolbar, then make it first.  If you want to add a blog link, go ahead.

5.Content

Never, never use any content that comes with the template.  Don’t even use the same wording for your copyright or contact info.  Make sure you custom write every section of your website, and ensure that you leave plenty of space for valuable content like educational articles and product reviews.

If you are really, really hopeless at web design and even customizing a template is beyond you, consider hiring a service to do the customizing for you.  It will probably cost you around $100, depending on the complexity of the job.

website design / help