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What Makes Great Websites: an Overview of Best Practices
As discussed in a previous article, there are several reasons why building a website could be a worthwhile venture for you and/or your business.
But once you’ve given the green light, how and where do you actually get started?
Some might opt for the kinds of templates you can find here, or here, or even here.
Templates are a significantly cheaper option than hiring a designer that often make perfect sense for bloggers, photographers, freelancers or penny-pinching startups that want a website up and running ASAP.
But of course, there are quite a few drawbacks associated with using templates.
Beyond the limited possibilities for customization, which are important not just to establish a unique brand identity but also to tailor the content and structure of your site to optimize conversion rates, templates are known for coming with quite a few annoying technical limitations (no on-page SEO options, messy code).
At the end of the day, what this all boils down to is that templates completely miss the bigger picture…
The point of having a website isn’t to simply have a web presence, it’s to have a dedicated tool to help you grow your business (more on this below).