Causing a headache for the hardcore coders in our industry, the use of theme websites is massively on the rise. Within such a fast moving industry, the use of themes allows web developers and clients to stay on trend; and if done effectively, increases engagement with your site and therefore your brand.

Themes Boost Functionality

There’s a whole manner of themes to choose from and plug ins to boost your websites capabilities, making website creation faster and more efficient. This approach also makes adding extras such as e-commerce to your site, much simpler. Core developed sites take far longer to create, often in excess of months to iron out any issues and to ensure they are streamlined for all platforms. This results in a delay for the client, who are often working towards a deadline. Even more restrictive to development, when core developed sites are requested, all too often the developers create a basic framework and build on this time and time again. This leaves little in the way of variance between sites created by the same web developer or company. Yet costs for these often runs into the tens of thousands, not including all the update and maintenance costs. Theme sites are able to avoid over-replication in site usability and appearance. They also assist to increase turnover by ensuring that the site is not only unique, but functional and ready in a fraction of the time of a core developed site.

Looking Ahead

Many small to medium sized enterprises,  start-up businesses and individuals will often attempt to create or boost their own online presence through the use of website building sites. These are a fast way to get your company online, but bear in mind that these allow only limited customisation. This is usually from a set selection of appearances and accessed only from the front end and altering the aesthetics. Ultimately this means that you can’t make alterations to suit your needs, thus these tend to be used only temporarily. Using themes from a Content Management System – CMS – such as WordPress, will give you greater freedom over your site. The use of themes does not mean that developers are lacking skill or becoming lazy; having a broad depth of coding knowledge is still required to make alterations or add capabilities. It simply means that they can be more efficient. This is not a skill that is easily picked up and most developers would still get a kick out of hunting through the themes code and fixing problematic site errors for themselves.

Low Cost, Faster Delivery and Developer Assistance

Templates, particularly ones with increased editing capabilities, can be costly if you want to buy a reusable theme, called an extended licence. However most regular licence themes, that can be used once only, are relatively low cost at around 50 pounds each.  These all come with a direct route of access to the themes developer, ensuring that any issues arising during customisation can be easily remedied. Issues are usually minor and can be fixed quickly, often resulting from theme updates that the developer knows inside and out. Maintaining your sites in this way takes a lot of the hassle out of hunting down mistakes in your own code. This is something that is particularly helpful if you are running several sites simultaneously, all with different layouts and system requirements.

Themes Do Not Mean Compromise

Using themes doesn’t mean you have to compromise on the appearance of your site, with thousands of themes available from different providers, there will always be something to suit you needs. Furthermore developers can select themes that are able to be heavily edited in order to create sites unique to every client. Stripping a theme back to its basic framework and rebuilding it for the client is often done in order to create more variance between sites.

Core development still has its place and will no doubt be popular among many developers and clients alike, however the abilities provided by the use of themes cannot be ignored and will only increase in popularity.