Templates play a huge and significant role in business.
In real estate for example, the process of selling a home starts and ends with the use of templates.
When the owners want to sell their home, their sales representative launches the process by completing a listing agreement for the owners to sign.
In preparing listing agreements, sales representatives do not start by pulling out a blank sheet of paper or open a new document on their computers.
Invariably, they access a template for a listing agreement. This template contains the critical standard elements of a listing agreement. It also contains blanks into which unique and specific details of the individual transaction are inserted.
On completion, the listing agreement contains the required standard elements as well as the particulars of the transaction.
The sale process is concluded by the completion of another template...this time the offer to purchase.
In fact, virtually every document used in a standard real estate transaction is a template of one form or another.
By using templates, we can be sure that the standard elements are included, as we prepare an individual and custom document for our clients.
With these standard...or technical issues...elements taken care of we can concentrate our efforts on doing what we do best, which is looking after individual clients.
The use of templates in building websites offer the same benefits as using templates to prepare documents.
They take care of the technical issues so we can concentrate our efforts on preparing client-satisfying web content.
Template-Based Websites
How well do templates work for building websites?
According to Don MacLean of Remax Executive Realty, quoted in yesterday's post,
“...the maintenance of a template based web site is far easier to maintain. I have had both, but when time is involved on a daily routine stick to a template...."
I totally agree and endorse Don's comments.
Charles Stallions raises raises a valid question.
“...Do you think that a template gets high rankings or what?”
In my opinion the answer is an unqualified and most enthusiastic yes.
Site Sell, whose template-based site building system I use, tracks the performance of its users.
Specifically it tracks traffic to users' sites and then calculates where SBI sites stand in relation to all sites in the world.
As I recall, this tracking shows that approximately
- 35% of SBI site owners are in the top 1% of sites world wide
- 50% of SBI site owners are in the top 2% of sites world wide
- 60% of SBI site owners are in the top 3% of sites world wide.
In other words, about 1/3 of SBI-developed websites outperform 99% of all websites worldwide.
Also, almost 2/3 of SBI-developed websites outperform 97% of all websites worldwide.
For me, that's pretty good evidence that template-based websites are search-engine friendly.
My Experience
Yesterday I used Alexa rankings to compare the performance of my own site with the site of the design company which prepared my first website.
On paper, this company is uniquely qualified to prepare successful websites. It is a husband-and-wife time in which she is a qualified and experienced graphic designer. Her husband likewise a trained and experienced website designer.
From a traffic perspective, my 2-year old template-based website is outperforming their older custom-designed site 10 to 1.
And not only that, Alexa reports that over the past 3 months the traffic to my site has increased 150%.
On the other hand, the traffic to the design company's website has remained the same for the past 3 months.
All things considered, template-based websites can and do rank well.
In case you missed it Juliet Johnson made the following comment in response to yesterday's post.
“...Making your site yourself may save money, but it takes a ton of time and you still have to get it found. I honestly wonder if it wouldn't be better to just spend the money, get the thing built and then spend your marketing time doing SEO and getting found.”
Once again, my experience in building my own site has been that I have saved money as well as doing the required SEO to get my site found.
Yes it took time...but is was time that I simply reallocated from doing other less productive things.
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