The thought of having to put together a website can be daunting sometimes, other times intimidating. There are so many ways of going about about it, plus many questions to ask e.g.: should I hire someone to do it, or should I use a pre-designed template package? But thankfully, it doesn't have to be complicated. I can show you why using a template is great for the short term, and how a custom designed solution could work better in the medium to long term.

Website templates are generally a one page starter package, containing HTML, custom style sheets and and other components which make up the website template. These are generally quite easy to modify (well, they would HAVE to be!), give you a great frame work to start with and let you get on with concentrating on arguably the most important part of your website: not the design, not the graphics, but the content! So, if you already have an existing design and visual structure to slot into place, then all you need to worry about is content, your information that your website visitors will be wanting! A website template will get you up and running quickly and allow you to get your content up in much less time than it might otherwise.

Once you have your website template modified to how you want it, plus have added your content, publish it for the world to see! Let everyone enjoy it!

After a few weeks or months of having already established your online presence, you may want to customise everything a bit more to suit your business (or personal preference) color scheme, modify how the whole site looks, maybe you want gradients, maybe you want to add a little bit of JavaScript (not too much though!). Well, depending on your experience and knowledge level, you may not know how to do these, or not sure how to integrate your new wish list into the existing website template. Or maybe you could, but you'd practically be re-writing a large amount of it anyway!

So, what can you do? This is where you can decide to either go ahead and insert your own custom modifications that extend the website template to more than it originally was, or to hire someone to give your website a whole new facelift. A third option is in the middle of the two: keep the website template and hire someone to carefully make those changes you require, while keeping it maintenance friendly. It's a balance often fought by designers and developers alike, but we usually get close.

Once you have everything the way you want it, sit back and enjoy your creation. Remember that website templates will get you up and running quicker, but depending on your knowledge and experience level, may or may not be able to be tweaked to the high level of customisations that you want. Either way, you'll have an internet presence that you and your customers will find a joy to visit, over and over again.

Best of luck with your website's success!

Martin is a writer and computer fanatic. He is available for writing assignments of any size and can be contacted via his website at http://www.martincoleman.com