Choosing the right theme for your website is a crucial aspect of web design. The fact that themes allow people with no prior knowledge of web design to create websites, for professional use is a major step up in the web design sector. However, as good as this sounds, creating a broken site doesn’t translate to credibility and trust from the people that visit it. What it does is, scare people away.
With this in mind, the tips below will help you as a web designer to know the perfect scenarios in which to incorporate certain themes. Lest we forget: most of these themes are modern, easily customizable, friendly and often cheap. This means, they can be easily swapped for a different purpose other than the one they were built for. This is the reason why am here. To help you identify the unique features and style of a theme, and the important factors to consider before using it.
Take into Consideration the Content You Need On Your Website
Website owners need different content on their sites. What do I mean by different content? Take for example an artist, they require a good design chassis to allow for upload of videos. A news website will require a web system that supports longer texts and comments from viewers/readers. Lastly, a company website will require an infrastructure that allows them to advertise the services they offer to their customers.
Looking at the above scenarios, which are just but a few examples of the requirements of different users out there; you notice that the integral system built to support the owner’s requirements are quite different. Swapping one template for the purpose of a different requirement will not give you the desired results. To avoid this, make sure you collect all the files that need to be uploaded in the website and understand what the website is all about. In doing so, you will be able to pick the right HTML template for your website.
Simplicity
The question you need to ask yourself is; how much effort are you willing to put? Editing a template is a lot easier compared to building a website from scratch. However, some themes come with a stretch of complexities; flashy animations, complex layouts and lots of colors. They end up making your editing a lot more complex than you anticipated.
What you need to do is; pick a template that guides your goal while at the same time requiring you to make minimal adjustments. These will save you time designing. Secondly, the users will have an easy time navigating the website. Otherwise, what’s the use of a great theme if users can’t find what they came to look for or find their way around it!
The Theme Should Be Responsive
You must be wondering what I mean by responsive. After all, the buttons and tabs in the Templates you have come across seem to be all working fine!
What I mean by responsive is; nowadays there are a number of platforms one can use to access information online. They range from small cellular devices to desktops and laptops. The users of this devices all have an unquenched thirst for information and need to go online once in a while to quench it.
Before using a theme, test it to determine how much friendly it is to the people using smaller devices. The best way to do this is by resizing the browser screen. As you resize it, look out for red flags; which may include, content overlapping the screen size or text being too small.
To get the most conclusive results on how friendly a theme is, you can also copy the url of the demo to Google’s mobile test page.
Browser Compatibility
All major browsers support HTML, duh! Yes, they do. In fact, that’s the beauty of html. But this doesn’t mean all html templates will work perfectly in all the browsers. Some templates might be broken in some browsers and not in others.
This is the reason why you need to test the template on all browsers both mobile and computer based to ensure it works fine. There are compatibility tools used to go about this; check out this link. They have free and paid for software that you can use to test the compatibility nature of your template.
SEO Friendliness
The template you use plays a major role in search engine optimization friendliness. A poorly coded template will affect its performance on the search engine.
For beginners, it is hard for them to analyze the templates source code. This is the reason why template developers notify you upfront that their theme has been optimized for search engines. You can also make use of w3c validation for validation purposes.
Time and Cost
A client gives you a job, you are excited about it and want to do it in the shortest time possible so that you can move on to other things. Choosing a poor theme, and adding things in a rush will prove futile when the website is launched and gains traction. Responding to things and navigation might end up being a struggle.
Secondly, you need to ask yourself what it is that you are investing in. Is it your time, money or it’s both of them? Unlike the free Templates, paid for templates are usually coded by experts and offer technical support. This, however, does not mean you should not checkout free templates. There are great free templates out there. But in no case are you to compromise quality for finishing up a project in the shortest time.
Parting shot
Template layout take into account the specific needs of website owners. Making use of a template that matches your business or service requirement, saves you a lot of customization time. Understand the visual language that needs to be in play: fonts, colours, icons and images. Get to understand the type of users that the website is meant to target. Checkout the websites below for some HTML templates:
