Choose to be flexible and customize.
To provide a website with a personal feel, the template needs to be tweaked. If businesses will only depend on regular templates that do not have their own original input, their website will not be set apart from thousands of other competitors that use the same template.
For this reason, those who developed these templates offer customization options. Some of them give a multitude of customization options to users but others only give a few options to make some changes on particular elements of their website.
Those who are not developers may feel that being more flexible in building their website makes it more complicated so would rather go for limited customization options.
However, they should look further ahead into the future. Later on, they may have to include non-default elements to their website and this can only be possible with flexible customization options.
Always decide on a responsive design.
This is quite obvious. A site that is not responsive is considered obsolete. Because of responsive templates, it is now possible to adjust the layout of a website so it can register well on screens of different devices. A lot of traffic is generated from mobile devices since many people use their cell phones to search and shop online and this trend increases each time.
So, businesses need to keep this in mind. No matter what the niche or demographic of their website, even if it is a news feed or an e-commerce site, if the website does not look good on mobile phones and other handheld devices, this will hurt their business.
Not very long ago, responsive design was only optional but things are different nowadays and a lot of templates have changed a lot and provide responsive and mobile-friendly themes. Still, there are a number of templates that do not give mobile-friendly layouts. Businesses should avoid these aberrations.
Go for SEO friendly templates.
Businesses certainly want more people to discover their website and this is not possible without Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Even if they are not able to create a captivating website with remarkable content, if they want their page to have a better rank in search engines, they have to use SEO techniques.
Aside from using beautiful designs, they have to provide smooth navigation and a solid hierarchy. In addition, they should use a particular template consistently and not a different one in each category. Using a lot of templates make it harder for users to navigate to their website.
Though some templates have an excellent design, SEO may still see it as poorly written so they should get SEO friendly templates. If templates are poorly coded, the website takes longer to load, which will affect their ranking.
Google and other search engines were clear in saying that extra loading time contributes to ranking so it is best to choose a well written template. Even when templates are search engine optimized, they need to be knowledgeable on the subject and for this reason, content is just as important.
