Templates — What Happened to Custom Design Work?

I am about to reach 40 and have been doing design work for just a little over 19 years now. It has been a long hard journey and continues to be that way with dealing with bad clients, tough economy and the idea that every idiot with a computer thinks they are a professional designer. Just irks me big time!

I find that on a daily basis, the industry in itself is just getting more template based, every site I seem to visit is a darn WordPress modified theme, but still looks like a template. Really, does every site out there need to look like a blog? I think a lot of this comes from the amateur wanna-be-designers, but even some professionals are going this direction. Maybe because clients are getting cheaper and don’t want to pay for custom work.

I recently had a call from a company that was upset that their site design was the same layout as their competitor and he wanted to do a redesign of his site. Of course I quoted him $3,500 for a 10 page site with Flash animation and he emails me back saying he only had $500 budget. What kinda crap is that? It is responses like this that just tick me off about how things are changing in our industry and how people do not value custom work, but they want custom design for a template price. Really, what the heck was this dude thinking, that I would be willing to settle for $10 an hour? I am positive he charges way more than that for his time!

Overall, I don’t mind templates if the client has a small budget or does not care that their corporate identity looks exactly the same as the dude next door. However, to standout from  your competition and to get noticed for uniqueness, there is no substitute for custom design. I guess that is why so many small low budget business fail each year, they do not standout from their competition.

Well, that is my rant for the morning. Just so we are all clear, there is a place for templates, I use one for this blog, but it is a blog and not my entire site. 🙂