Years ago when I used to work for Rediff.com I was in charge of their template website department called Rediff Homepages. Basically what we provided was an a quick and simple way to set up your website using a form driven interface without the user having to know any html or coding language. At its peak we have over 50,000 users, many of them were the earliest users of web in India (I am talking of 1999-2002 period). This was quite popular with Geocities and Angelfire having millions of users worldwide.
With the dotcom bust these template driven Free websites also went out of business as everything online went fee based and the good old days of the web were replaced with the cut throat pricing of the web hosting providers. But even at its peak only about 10% of the template driven websites were actively being used by their owners. Others just remained dead or unused.
Today although there are sites giving template driven websites they are now linked with some type of hosting package. Basically they have become value-adds for the hosting companies to list among their features.
Case in point Yahoo Hosting - http://in.business.yahoo.com/build-your-website/
But now I am seeing something of a reemergence of these template driven sites. They are being touted as a time-saving marketing solution for the busy professional. Not to mention money-saving in a tight economy. They are usually priced about 10-15% of what it would take to hire website professionals such as us.
Do they work? Lets take a look at the Pros and Cons. Some of them are quite obvious.
Pros
Cons
The 80-20 principle.
This principle tends to apply here to maybe. Just a thought. 80% of people might go for a template based website. But there will be 20% who will invest in a web design solution. These are also the 20% with the fastest growing businesses who reap tremendous benefits from their sites and use them as an important part of their businesses.
And then there are the exclusive 5% percenters like many of my clients who go the whole hog to give their customers a fantastic web experience. No template for them. Its professional websites baby!!
Cheers,
Ron
Do visit us at http://www.miracleworx.com
Also check out our portfolio at http://www.miracleworx.com/portfolio.htm
He has been in the web development business for the almost two decades.He is a keen student of marketing and business development and writes regularly on web strategy and other related topics which is read and followed by many every month.