The Seraph Technology Solutions site was one of my favorite recent projects. It was quite a challenge. Not only were we limited by budget, but were limited by time frame. Any Management 101 class will tell you that in a scenario like that, quality will suffer. Luckily for them, they hired me. I am very good at putting polish on quickly. And these awesome guys do IT – so they were able to build up the infrastructure themselves after the design was complete.
This site is a good example of a unique business model in design. I did not create the site template – we used a template. Yet the result is very unique to the company.
I like to offer clients the option of removing several steps from the design process. This saves budget. Seraph had only one week and very limited budget to go live. And after all the preliminary meetings and waiting for content and images, I really had only 4 days to design this site.
After initial limitations were discussed, the we agreed to use a pre-made template on the WordPress platform. And because there are some outstanding website templates out there, this yields impressive results. Working on a pre-made template allows me to focus on two things only (1) project management and configuration of the site and (2) graphics and page layout. And these are some of my most outstanding skills.
The basic fact is, the amount of hours required to build and test a website template is not always worth the effort for many small businesses. So the natural question is, if buying a template, why would you need to hire a designer? Well, for several reasons.
Consider this option for your next website or micro site. You will not be able to get the entire kitchen sink of features, but as technology changes quickly, you may get much more than you expected to.