I recently launched my latest site, Reynolds and Co Bookkeeping. I’ve done a few websites in the past few years but this is significant in that it’s the first site I’ve done in a while where I wasn’t the subcontractor. It’s also significant because I didn’t design a good bit of the site; I used a template. Using a template for web design is a good way to spend more time on other aspects of the job, and quite frankly, save your clients a lot of cost in billable hours.
It’s also helpful when your client is a joy to work with. That’s key… she asked me to swing for the fences (in a very professional manner) and I did. It looks sharp. My wife, who is a very honest critic of my web endeavors (I can speak to specifics but trust me, she has told me when something I’m involved with sucks), loves the site.
Why a template, and why am I copping to it? Because it’s ultimately not important. The finished product is.
About ten years ago, I went to an Alton Brown book signing. Alton’s a good speaker and quite passionate about science and cooking and the overlap therein. He’s also quite candid. I forget the precise question that was asked at the Q&A but it was about cooking homemade food vs. support local restaurants and food stores, and part of his answer absolutely stuck in my mind. He admitted to using boxed cake mix rather than baking from scratch and said “I have yet to make a cake as good as Betty Crocker.” My Reddit-fu is failing me, but I recently read a thread where someone described a friend of hers who made amazing wedding cakes for celebrity clients that ran into the thousands per job, to rave reviews and repeat word-of-mouth business, and the friend always just used cake mixes she bought by the pallet-load at the local 99 cent store.
That’s the point of the boxed mix, right? It’s supposed to be delicious, moist and be a good vessel for frosting and decoration. But we also know that there’s a world of difference between a boxed cake that’s frosted in and cut out of the same pan in which it was baked (sorry, Moms of the world… we still love you), and the same boxed cake that’s baked in small 9″ rounds and stacked high between layers of chocolate mousse and fondant. Presentation is the key. Same with a web site. Templates are simply CSS, a bit of PHP and div tags that are filled with SEO-optimized content and graphics and color schemes.
Many years ago, before content management systems like WordPress and Drupal became the norm, it was common to simply build a site from scratch. In fact, sites were rarely even dynamically generated when I first started; it was all flat file HTML and tables. The time from design to launch was measured in months rather than weeks, and updates were expensive and had to be done by the firm that designed the site, unless you went in-house. It took a few years for CMSes to really catch on with designers and it was mostly for several reasons:
- When you use a CMS, you can’t bill the client as much both in the design of the site and in the updates a year or two down the road. So, some firms resisted.
- A site that a client can maintain themselves? Where’s the recurring revenue supposed to come from? Again, resistance.
- It felt like cheating. Professional web developers were supposed to do just that: develop. It wasn’t uncommon for developers to start up ersatz content management systems from scratch on each new project.
Did I do these things? Guilty as charged. Eventually, upstart web design firms were embracing CMSes and undercutting the big expensive firms. I’m happy to say I was an early adopter of CMSes, but ashamed to say that I only recently started using templates and themes. I think I may go that route as the norm now. I don’t need to be big; I just like to help folks out. Megan’s business philosophy is much the same. If you are in need of professional bookkeeping in the Portland, Oregon area (or beyond, because why not?), you should contact her.