This article is designed to give you clarity on the utility of Webflow templates. Here are the main reasons people decide to buy one.
Reason #1: The obvious - It’s super cheap
While the template itself costs about $60-$150, depending on how much you want to change it, a developer who can actually understand how the template works, including the custom code that is often used everywhere, and is thus capable of implementing your requests without breaking the whole site will easily cost you an additional $2000-$3000+. This is money you are burning, because you are not going to be satisfied with the results (more on that later) and will want a proper website next year.
Reason #3: You fell in love with the looks
They all look amazing, right? Template designers use very specific content to give you the impression that you are buying the most stylish website ever created...
It's all decoration
The myriads of layouts and elements that look amazing and seem to cover every use case imaginable are all composed to have perfect visual balance, not to display your specific content. They have just the right length of text, huge headlines, impressive blocks of giant type, pretty little buttons and random icons, great looking little widget-like components, random little this and that, useless UI elements and above all, stunning random images that look like someone hired Annie Leibovitz (famous photographer known for iconic, staged celebrity portraits, including the final photo shoot of John Lennon and Yoko Ono).
This creates a “mold”. If your content is not exquisitely structured to fill this mold perfectly (and it is not) we will start to delete everything.
The breakdown:
The logo
Modern, minimalist random logo that is styled to fully harmonize with the website’s looks. Your logo is not.
Stunning color palette: Impressive, huge surfaces of radiant colors. If you have a CI, these are not your colors and the site will look very different once we update the color scheme.
Amazing huge text: Copy that is either a massive single word not longer than 6-8 characters, or short headlines perfectly measured to be as huge as possible. We will delete all the single words (because no one communicates using single words) and reduce all the headline sizes by 50% because your copy is going to be much longer and I’m looking at you specifically, Herr Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitäten…
Eyebrows (the little text above all the headlines): Decoration. 95% of copy I receive does not have them.
Flashy Little “Widgets”: Decoration that has no use case. We will remove all of them.
A lot of pretty buttons and UI elements: Decoration. Most of it will be removed because you don’t need it.
Perfect alignment: While in print design you can align the end of content blocks to fall perfectly on one line, website content has dynamic length. Template designers often use copy that has the exact length so it’s bottom exactly aligns with the content block next to it. This is a trick that breaks immediately, if,,, A.) ...you resize the browser window B.) ...your copy is 10 characters longer or shorter than the placeholder text – which of course it is.
… and above all, STUNNING IMAGES: These images have been chosen explicitly to have the highest amount of negative space possible (homogeneous background or a lot of blur), because that is what looks good on a website. You do not have a single photo like this.
Reason #3: The CMS is already set up
Because a template needs to cover every use case, they generally have a CMS setup that would cover 12 websites. These will include CMS collections with the number of input fields on a USCIS form (of which you will use five). Because of how Webflow works, deleting excess fields, or excess collections bloating your pageload, is the equivalent of untangling 200 yards (182,88 meters) of fishing line. So look forward to uploading a testimonial through the control panel of a nuclear power plant.
Reason #4: You want a unique website, but think that the template is going to be a good foundation for it
No. In buying me a $60 asset kit, you, in fact, have not reformed my workflow. I already have an asset kit and mine is bigger and betterer. It’s also not a mess.
Reason #5: But the classes are already set up
… which is the biggest problem. Unless the template explicitly states it uses a framework like Client-First (Finsweet) or Knockout you are likely walking into a CSS nightmare. Class names like Div Block 47 or Heading 2 Red Copy Copy 2 are common, making global style updates frustratingly manual. I also have no idea where these classes have been reused throughout the site and will have to check every single elements on every single page after making any changes. Just because of this, templates are radioactive in the eyes of any developer who actually has the skills of untangling this mess.
Reason #6: The animations are amazing
Information about "Spaghetti" Interactions: Many templates rely on complex, element-specific interactions that look great but won't alight with your needs out of the box. If we start customizing it, e.g. change the DOM structure (wrap a text block in a div, rearrange elements), the interaction triggers usually break. Debugging someone else's interaction logic is arguably the most painful task only surpassed by childbirth, migranes and gout.
The result
After we're done with the "customization", what remains is a CMS setup that is total overkill, a bunch of text styles, two buttons, 6 layouts, a navbar and a footer that that now look empty.
The final result will look nothing like the preview that seduced you into buying it.
A case for templates - #1
Templates are best used as "off-the-shelf"/”as is” solutions that prioritize a cheap, quick turnaround and nothing else. If you can structure your content to fit the mold exactly, or simply don't care about looks, a template is a quick, cheap solution.
But try this
Don’t hire a developer right away, that negates the cheapness. First have an intern upload your logo, replace the text, the images, and delete superfluous elements. If the results do not meet your expectations, you have not successfully ruined the creative industry by discovering the infinite value of a $59 Webflow template and need an actual website.
A case for templates - #2
If you are building an eCommerce platform (a webshop) a pretty design is negligable compared to seamless functionality. Use Shopify. Their templates are battle-tested and Shopify has plugins for any extra function imaginable.
Upload products, customize navigation, change the colors, install necessary plugins, launch.
Verdict
For a professional Webflow developer, a template is often more work than a custom build, because reconstruction/deconstruction takes longer than construction.
Templates are not a base for a scalable, long-term corporate website.
Token Advert
If you are starving for a website that you can scale for years to come, forget templates. Instead, check out FLO, my excessively client-friendly Webflow framework, and contact me to make it yours.
