Is Your Website A High Quality Piece Of Garbage?
I’ve experienced the highs and lows of the web design industry.
I was part of the responsive design boom, making cash hand over fist helping brands adapt their sites to smartphones.
I was also there when shortly after that we saw people ditch their existing websites for themes which offered native responsive features…
Today, the majority of the market is all about themes.
Some estimates approximate ThemeForest to be worth $274 million USD alone.
While a lot of the themes you can buy on these sites look great, they don’t always work that well for businesses.
They are high-quality pieces of garbage.
I Missed The Boat!
Back in 2004 I built my very first website.
I built it in Notepad by following a HTML for Dummies book. Today that doesn’t sound uncommon, but at the time it was.
It was discouraged by teachers, scoffed at by parents as youthful idealism and teased by friends as being “nerdy”.
The result was;
I built sites infrequently over the course of my teens.
But over the years I got better at it.
Until around 2010, I was no longer living at home, and I started doing it semi-professionally.
Then as a full-time freelancer in 2012.
But it was short lived, and I stopped being a web designer in 2013.
I missed the boat (if only I had started earlier) =[
I Didn’t See The Changing Landscape Coming
One of the great things about the web is that we all have the ability to go out there and learn what used to be available only to a select few.
The web has also given some people, myself included, a lot of social mobility.
It’s always been the great leveler, and hopefully it stays that way.
The reason I never stayed in web design came down to the creation of mass produced themes.
Yup… I’m one of those guys. Anyone who has been around a while online knows about them.
We all know that the rise of themes meant that a lot of professionals lost their businesses.
We just don’t talk about it a lot.
And sure some people were fine…
Those with better marketing skills, those who were more established or the ones who anticipated the change and planned for it all survived.
That wasn’t me…
I went from making a few thousand a month without much effort, to struggling to survive when applying for as many jobs as I could on freelancing job sites.
And so with limited time I moved into working full-time in what had previously just been an upsell.
I transitioned into SEO. It’s fair to say I never looked back…
I’ve ran a 5 figure agency, built a small empire of affiliate sites and also created a training community with over 3,000 members.
Today I’m mainly focused on a few sites, my community and Pathtorch — my latest B2B venture.
The Theme Landscape Hasn’t Been Entirely Successful
I came to terms with the loss of my web design career a long time ago. I accept that maybe it was for the best, not just for me but the industry as well.
Looking back, I can see why a lot of people saw it coming.
The web has always been about reducing the barrier to entry for businesses. It’s been rife for disruption since the start.
Themes have given more people access to the world of business online.
It hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows though…
People are exploiting known vulnerabilities in themes, as active development is rare.
That’s just the security side, not to mention the actual design problems.
And yes…
The standard design quality of sites HAS improved.
While most of them look good… They actually suck for your business.
They are high-quality pieces of garbage. Mirage websites. They look great, but don’t perform well (whichever way you look at it).
The problem is the economics of it… The designers focus on creating a theme or set of themes that appeals to as many businesses as possible.
Which allows them to lower the price, by selling that one design to thousands of customers.
But this has hurt a lot of businesses. It’s hurt them by lulling them into a false sense of security.
It’s never going to be the best you could get, and if you don’t want the best for your business then I think you’re doomed. That’s my personal opinion.
But as I said, the problem is that a lot of businesses don’t see the problem.
Branding, code quality, user experience and so much more suffer when you use a mass produced theme.
It’s just not doing the best for your business, and that’s a fact.
Pro tip: Start with a great theme, and have great designers build you something better later down the line.
Not Everyone That Claims To Be a Web Designer Is One
The other problem is that today, anyone that can install WordPress thinks they are a web designer, or that somehow their opinion holds as much weight as a web designer.
This clearly isn’t true.
When some of these same people use theme options and plugins to further customize their mass produced themes, you see a lot of design mistakes being made.
So it’s not just about the theme companies.
It’s about the wolves in sheep’s clothing that are hungry to cut-costs by building their own sites or offering to do it for others at reduced rates.
This costs businesses in ways that aren’t totally measurable, but we are seeing conversion rate optimization become a bigger industry today.
In part that’s because of the increasing cost of acquiring traffic, and in part because a lot of these “high-quality” sites fail to convert.
That comes back to this idea that you can do it just as good as a designer can.
It’s a false economy.
You don’t know what you don’t know.
Which is exactly why I don’t try to fix the pipes, and why I have a plumber do it instead.
Years After Leaving Design I’m An Award-Winning Designer…
If this statement doesn’t show that something is up I don’t know what does.
I was a good designer, but I’ve been out of the game for a while…
When I designed and coded my new companies site this year, I was shocked to have won some awards and accolades for it.
and…
Today there are very few truly bespoke websites out there… So this meant my site stands out even more.
Sensing the opportunity?
There IS an opportunity here for your business.
Opting for a bespoke site eventually means you will get better results across the board (assuming you get good designers to do it).
It’s going to make you stand out in your industry, and you might even get some acknowledgement for that like I did.
The moral of the story is, we’ve acknowledged the good that themes offered the internet.
But it’s also time to acknowledge the limitations and drawbacks of themes.
And if you can do that you can start actually planning for a better site.
Thanks for reading.
