When creating a WordPress website, there are two main possible options to choose, either using a pre made theme or creating one from scratch. Obviously, we create our websites from scratch, but I’ll try not to be too biased to help you decide which is best for you.

Pre made WordPress website theme are readily available and are very well priced, from around $40 for a basic theme to $90 for a fully featured theme. Often, the themes even have multiple ready made websites within the theme. You simply select the design style you like, press to import and the website is set up for you. You then need to add your own logo, select you colours, replace their images and text and there you go.

A custom designed and built website is a polar opposite. Firstly there is the design process, that creates one off designs that are thoughtfully crafted to represent you, your business and work perfectly for your website visitors. This design is then developed, starting from a blank sheet to create efficient and fast code.

Let’s try and highlight the pros and cons of both together;

As you can see, which to choose will depend on your needs. If you are after an inexpensive website presence, a pre made website will work very well for you. If you need more from your website, a custom made website will be the better option.

Our experience of pre made websites

Since we began creating websites in 1995, we have only ever built 2 pre made websites. One was in 2018, the other 2022, just a few weeks ago. This latest foray in to pre made themes is the driver for this blog post. Our customer wanted to use us to create the website, but as the business is new with limited cash flow, wanted to use a pre made website they found which seems perfect for their needs. The plan is to then come back to us in a few years to create another website from scratch.

Within 1 hour, we had downloaded the pre made website, installed on our development server and set up the sub theme our customer wanted to use. One hour to create a working website is crazy, so far so good.

The next step was to add our customers logo and colours. We found the logo update area and uploaded the correct logo. Browsing the website, the logo was way too big, but the pre made theme had no option to make this in to the correct size. Not to worry, we created a new size logo and uploaded that, no problem for us, but a general user likely will not have the tools to be able to achieve this.

Next step was colours. The pre made theme was strewn with bright colours and not on brand at all. We then found the colour admin area and began making changes. And more changes, and more changes and then some more. The colours and labels in the admin area didn’t fully match the website, meaning there was a lot of trial and error. Just as we thought we had it cracked, there were many instances on the website where we could not change the colour. No problem, we created some scripts to change that colour for us. Again, that’s fine for us, but an average user will not be able to write those scripts to modify the pre made theme.

So now we have our logo and colour scheme. But all of the content is dummy content and stock images. Let’s start with the homepage and change the text and images there. The theme features a slider at the top, lets update that. Hmmm, the slider is not found in the homepage admin area, we find it behind a third party plugin. We change the image on slide 1 and test, but the image is too small. So let’s upload a larger one, now it’s too big. We then grab the slider default image and create a new image exactly to those dimensions and insert. The image is now the correct size but for some reason is nudged to the right of the slider and not in the same place. What the who now? Long story short, the slider took almost 4 hours to build.

Now for the content beneath the slider, this is actually found in the homepage admin area. All we see is a sea of code, aha, the theme is using a page builder to build the pages instead of default WordPress functionality. The theme builder is adding masses of additional code to the page, but it’s ok, we find a visual editor so click on that. We are now presented with a view similar to our homepage, but we can’t select any of the text areas. It turned out that there was a bug in one of their files, the page builder we installed was newer than the page builder the theme was initially created with, causing conflicts. No problem for us, we added some more code to fix the conflicts and went about updating text and images.

This blog is waffling on, but to TL;DR, the project ended up taking us 80% of the time it would have taken to build a custom theme from scratch, we had to write quite a bit of code to sort the pre made theme issues and we didn’t enjoy ourselves. Anyone with a copy of Photoshop and coding knowledge would have been stuck at multiple points, which really takes away from the premise of pre made website themes.

Something to be wary of

There are many ‘website agencies’ who never write a line of code, instead, they use these pre made websites to create you a ‘unique website’ by changing logos and colours. That’s fine, as long as they cost the website as such, but many agencies are creating websites this way, whilst charging the price of a custom designed and built website. That’s not cool.