Commercial template or your own?

Should I create my own template or purchase a commercial template?

I get asked this question all the time. I often create my own templates but will sometimes use a template created by a reputable template shop/club. There are pros and cons to each approach:

Commercial Templates

• Pros
  • Premade look and feel
  • Pre-tested
  • Ready to install
  • Often comes with a quickstart installation with demo content to use as a template
  • Usually have alot of “bells and whistles”
  • One doesn’t have to worry about graphic design 😉
  • The cost involved is often alot less than what one would spend developing a custom template
• Cons
  • They cost money
  • They are often inflexible since they need to be generic (to appeal to a wide audience. Look in the source view of a commercial template, it’s often huge with a horrendous number of nested divs and javascript includes!)
  • Bells and whistles are great but all of this comes at a price to performance
  • Since you did not create the code you will not know it inside-out like you would your own
  • Can be very difficult to “skin” these to a designer’s specifications

Your own Templates

• Pros
  • You write the code, you know the code
  • Complete control and flexibility
  • Template is customised for the project so the code should be much cleaner (and faster)
• Cons
  • You must make your own designs or source them somewhere else (this may not be a problem for you)
  • You be accomplished at XHML, CSS and Javascript and at least proficient in PHP
  • You need to do all of the testing yourself, this includes testing each popular browser of the day
  • Can take time
  • You cannot just email a development agency for support

For non-complex websites I would normally create my own template. For those which require a huge amount of items to be displayed and require alot of features I would look for a matching commercial template first and then ask a graphic designer if they could provide customisations to the imagery and colours for me to reuse.