Starting something new always comes with a bag of mixed emotions. You’re excited because it’s a chance to start fresh and learn something new. You’re also a little concerned, and maybe afraid, because you don’t know what to expect and you might disappoint yourself and others.
As an agency owner, specifically in design and marketing, you know this feeling all too well. Every new project is an opportunity to improve your processes and overall project quality, but also comes with some uncertainty and anxiety.
One way to improve your processes is to incorporate HTML templates into them. We have a blog post on our site about how your agency can do this here.
While these templates can speed up your development time and improve the overall project quality, they may add to the uncertainty you already had because you may not know what makes a template worth purchasing.
To ease some of the anxiety that might come with purchasing HTML templates, I’ll go through exactly what you should look for.
Good first impression
When searching for a template, you need one that’s going to catch your eye or capture your interest. If it doesn’t grab your eye, it’s probably not going to grab the eyes of your client or your clients’ customers.
Visually Pleasing
The template has to look visually pleasing. Different people have different tastes when it comes to design, but the template should follow basic design principles. White space, hierarchy, and color palettes are all things you can see right away. If one of those principles is lacking, then the template you’re looking at isn’t good enough.
Solid User-Experience
Ease of use is extremely important in web design, so finding a template with a strong UX is essential. Navigation and well placed call-to-actions are easy to spot out right away. Does it take you some time to understand how the template works, and how to navigate around? Then you know that you should look at other templates.
If you find that a template doesn’t follow basic UI/UX best practices, continue looking.
Checking under the hood
A good first impression is obviously important when deciding if an HTML template is worth purchasing. But there is more work needed before making a final decision.
Size of the code base
Considering these are just templates, the code base should not be a hefty one. The heavier the code, the slower page load times tend to be. So it’s best to find a template with a lighter code base.
One way template creators keep the CSS code base light, is to store common styles in one class. That way when they need to style an element with the same styling, they just call that same class, as opposed to repeating the same CSS code.
Unfortunately to get a complete look at the code, you have to buy the template. One way to get a glimpse inside without purchasing, is to inspect the template on your browser. Click on ‘live preview’ or ‘live demo’. Once the template opens as a demo, open up your inspector and take a look at the HTML code. If you see a lot of the same class names used throughout the page, that’s a good sign. That means there should be less CSS code needed to style individual elements.
W3C Compatible
Some common items to check for W3C compliance is to ensure that all images have alt tags, there are no empty hrefs, and there is enough contrast between backgrounds and text. You can run these templates through W3C compliance checkers like this one here.
Media Queries
It’s 2021 so you don’t have to be told that mobile responsiveness is a must have in all web projects. So finding an HTML template with media queries is essential. A quick way to check this is to inspect the template in mobile view.
Finding the right template for your web projects doesn’t have to be stressful. You don’t want to spend money on something that isn’t useful, so the anxiousness is understandable. Hopefully this breakdown can help ease some of that so you can purchase an HTML template in peace.
