Why I don't start from a template

There is a version of this argument that is pure snobbery, and I am not making it. Templates are fast, cheap, and for plenty of situations they are the right call. If you need a site up this week and the alternative is no site at all, use a template.

But when someone comes to me having already tried that and found it did not work, the reason is almost always the same, and it is not that the template looked bad.

A template decides the order before you do

Every template is an argument about what matters. Hero image, three feature boxes, a row of logos, testimonials, contact form. That structure came from somewhere, but it did not come from your business.

So you fill it in. Your services get compressed into three boxes because there are three boxes. The thing that actually makes you different gets a sentence somewhere in the middle, because the template did not have a slot for it. The site ends up describing a generic version of your business rather than yours.

That is a structural problem, and no amount of changing the colours fixes it.

What I do instead

I work out what each page needs to say and in what order before any design happens. Which question a visitor is asking at that point in the page, and what has to be true for them to keep reading. Then the layout follows from that.

Sometimes the answer looks fairly conventional, because conventions exist for a reason. The difference is that it is conventional on purpose rather than by default.

Framer is a tool, not a template

I build in Framer, which occasionally gets read as using a template. It is not. Framer is where the site gets built, the same way a house gets built with particular tools. What goes in it is designed around your business, your customers and your goals.

It also means you can update your own content afterwards without calling me, which matters more than most people expect it to.