Template
A ready-made layout. A fair shortcut when it is the product you bought, a letdown when you paid for custom.
What does Template mean?
A pre-built page layout you fill with your logo and your words. It speeds up a do-it-yourself site, and it is why many businesses in one town end up looking related.
Also called: theme, layout
What you are actually buying
A template decides the columns, the type, and the order of sections. You swap photos and sentences. In a website builder the template is part of the subscription. In WordPress it is often called a theme. The idea is the same: start from a look that already exists.
That is legitimate. A new cafe that needs a menu online this weekend may be right to start there. The disappointment is a proposal that says custom and then delivers a theme with the name changed. Ask the question in what to ask a web designer.
Where templates strain
They are designed for a generic business, so the sections you need may not exist and the sections you do not need are hard to remove. A roofer does not need a hotel booking bar. A lawyer does not need a recipe block. Fighting the template becomes the project.
They also travel badly. When you leave the tool, the template stays behind. Your words can move. The look is rebuilt. Knowing that early keeps the monthly fee honest.
Custom, stated plainly
Artol sites on this offer are fully custom. The layout comes from the audit and from competitive market research, not from a theme gallery. Fully custom does not mean a different art movement on every page. It means the pages exist because of this business.
If you love a template you already paid for and it is doing the job, keep it. We will not insult a tool that fits. If you are tired of looking like the demo, that is the conversation we are for.
An example
A med spa demo template opened with a countdown timer and a stock treatment room. The owner had neither a sale nor that room. Stripping the timer still left a layout about a promotion. A custom page about the visits they offer, with no outcome promised, matched the practice they run.
Questions we get asked
Are templates bad for SEO?
Not by being templates. Thin, duplicated text is the problem, and you can write thin text on a custom site too. The layout is not what makes a page worth opening.
Can you start from my template and restyle it?
We design the site rather than reskinning a theme we do not intend to keep. If staying inside that theme is the requirement, say so. It may be a different quote.
