Templates are somebody else's answer to somebody else's question. They're built for a hypothetical client with a hypothetical business, and they're designed to be inoffensive enough to work for as many people as possible. That's the opposite of what good design does. Good design is specific. It makes choices. It says something particular about a particular business to a particular audience. You can't get that from a template, however good it looks in the preview.

I understand the appeal. Templates are fast, affordable and reasonably predictable. If you need something live by next week and you don't have budget for anything else, a well-chosen template is better than nothing. But it comes with a cost that isn't always visible up front.

That cost is differentiation. A template puts you in the same visual language as every other business that bought the same template. Your competitors are probably using something similar. Your audience – whether consciously or not – registers the sameness. It doesn't build trust. It doesn't communicate expertise. It says you made the same choice everyone else made.

There's also a less obvious cost: the compromise. Templates are built around the content they were designed for, not yours. Fitting your content into someone else's structure means one of two things: either you change your content to fit the template, or you fight the template to fit your content. Either way, something gets lost.

The alternative isn't necessarily expensive. A designer who understands your business, starts from your content, and builds something that's genuinely yours – that's a different kind of investment. One that pays for itself every time someone visits your site and stays. Take a look at the work to see what that looks like in practice, or get in touch to talk through what you need.