websitedesigningamarillo.com

Terminology changes with time, and it's always a good idea to occasionally pause and define what our terms imply.

A few years back I dropped by an air conditioning parts supplier where I asked for a 24 volt AC relay. Relays are overly common in many fields including automotive and electronics, and no less common than bread in a grocery store. The young salesman behind the counter looked at me oddly and then insisted that they did not carry relays. Since I could not imagine the possibility of any electrical supply house not carrying relays, I continued the conversation until I learned that the new term for relays was "actuator."

Similarly, in years past the term "directory" was almost the only word used when referring to data segments of a hard drive or floppy, but today many people are only familiar with the term "folder." The days of configuring config-sys and autoexec are long gone, as well as setting IRQ jumpers, but the terms and methods we learned twenty-five years ago are not so easily forgotten.

In the past, a website template was what we referred to as a prefigured/pre-coded HTML file that the user only needed to change a few words and then upload to a server. The templates might offer the option of changing a few graphics and colors, but all of the websites made from the templates looked very similar. The cookie-cutter templates were popular among individuals who wanted a free website but did not want to do any actual programming.

Templates today can now imply the XML/HTML/CSS/PHP structure of a content management system (CMS) like the one that this web page is structured upon. Creating the template for this type of page requires a good quantity of expertise, but using the template is quite simple. Generally, CMS systems like Joomla! and WordPress are all template-based which allows the user to change words, graphics, and colors without the user knowing how to program and create the template itself.

There is a difference between creating a template and using a template. When we say that we do not use templates for our websites, we are implying that we do not use prefigured cookie-cutter HTML files that only need text, graphics, and colors changed. We do, however, create and modify CMS templates for CMS sites. Clear as mud? The terminology can be confusing, and so perhaps the best way of explaining the difference is by my saying that we do not use automated website-creation software to build cookie-cutter websites. Except for CMS sites, all of our sites are hand-coded from the bottom up.

Have you noticed that a rapidly growing percentage of websites now appear very similar? When using a search engine to research a topic, it is now not uncommon to find over 50% of the listed websites having a similar layout, and depending on the topic, the percentage of look-alike sites can climb to over 90%. Except for differences in color and header graphics, the websites are clones.

Why are so many websites now so similar? The answer is simple: more people are using CMS (content management system) software to build their websites, and since most of the users do not know HTML and CSS, the users must rely on using the same pre-made templates that most all of the other users are also using. Joomla!, WordPress, Drupal, and DotNetNuke often have excellent features for their intended use, but more often than not the websites themselves will appear far too similar to all of the other websites using the same CMS web design.

For those of us who are on the Internet hours each day, it can become a bit depressing to repeatedly land on clone sites. The item that I notice most often is that most of the websites could have been created with simple HTML and CSS in less time than it took the owners to create the 'free' CMS clones, and the HTML/CSS site would load much faster as well as be more stable.

There are several other advantages to a straight-HTML site over CMS sites. We are always happy to explain the advantages to our customers.

A problem that has grown increasingly more common is for webmasters to copy the text from one person's site to the webmasters' own. I recently searched in Google for a javascript module, and of the 100 different websites in Google's top 100 results, over 90 of the results had the same identical wording as the other websites. The remaining websites simply did not have any information relative to the search, so technically, 100% of all content (except for the original article) on the topic was copied from only one source.

SEO (search engine optimization) tip: use your own content, write your own articles in your own words, make your content unique, and you will stand a better chance of earning a higher search engine ranking. Plus too, visitors will stay on your site longer because they will know that your website isn't just one more of the many thousands of copy-cats.

Plagiarism is not cool; it shows the visitor that the website is of a very low quality.

Similar to changing themes in Windows, you can change the colors and style of Joomla by using different templates. A template is the (X)HTML and CSS coding plus the graphics of what is seen on the screen. The current template used for this site is RedEvo_Aphelion. We expect to design a new template for the site in the near future.

Joomla has three built-in templates, but thousands of free and commercial templates are available for downloading from dozens of providers. There are also a couple template creator programs that enable a webmaster to create a new template without the webmaster knowing HTML, CSS, or how to create graphics. I have not yet tested the template creators, so I prefer to not yet comment on their usefulness.

Most of the free templates require that the user keeps a link to the website from where the template was downloaded. For most users the link will not be important since the webmaster's website will likely rarely be seen by the public. Once a website gains popularity, it is often preferred to remove all links to any website that is not a part of or in some manner related to the webmaster's own website.

Should you use templates? If your website needs CMS (content management system: like blog software), and you do not know nor want to learn HTML/CSS, then Joomla and similar CMS software can be a good choice. You should be aware, however, that hundreds or thousands of other websites may be using the same template, which simply means that your website will be a copy-cat of other sites. If you want your website to be unique, then either have a web designer design a template for you, or design your own template with an automated template creator.

From what I have seen to date of two automated template creators, both appear to work as intended, but they are both limited to changing only a few variables like the header graphic, text size, text font, menus, etc.. At a cost of about $60.00 for a 3 month subscription for one creator, and about $130.00 for a downloadable creator, the cost is not too bad, but the question should be asked: would the money be better spent on having a professional web designer design the template?

Opinion: if a website is intended for high search engine optimization (SEO), and if the website does not need frequent updates from users, then the time and money spent on free Joomla and free templates might be better invested in a dedicated hand-built website. Our basic one-page web design starts at $199.00. If a person is going to spend around $130.00 for a template creator, plus do all the work themselves, might it be a better bargain to pay a web designer an additional $70.00 to do all the work and have high search engine rankings as well?