Fourteen years, no templates.The actual reason.
It isn’t purism, and it definitely isn’t cheaper for us. It’s that a template quietly makes you design the content to fit the box.
Every so often someone asks whether we could just start from a theme and save everyone a fortnight. It is a fair question and the honest answer takes longer than a no.
Templates are not badly made. Most of them are made extremely well, by people who have thought hard about typography and spacing. The problem is not quality. The problem is direction of travel.
The box comes first
A template arrives as a set of shapes: a hero with a heading, subheading and one button. A three-across feature row. A testimonial slider. Those shapes were designed before anyone knew what your business does, so the work of using them is a translation exercise, taking what you need to say and cutting it down until it fits.
Nobody decides to do that. It happens one small compromise at a time. The heading has room for six words, so the message becomes six words. There are three feature slots, so there are three features. The testimonial slider wants five quotes, so somebody goes and finds five.
You end up designing the content to fit the box, and then wondering why the site sounds like everyone else’s.
What bespoke actually buys
When we built the BARC site there were upwards of 25 championships generating results, news and events across a season, with multiple people editing at once. No template has a shape for that. The whole job was working out the content architecture so cross-section material populated where it needed to without anyone entering it twice.
For England Ice Hockey the opposite was true. An enormous range of page-to-page content where almost nothing repeated. Each page got made individually, because dropping it into a repeating pattern would have flattened the differences that mattered.
- The layout follows what the page has to do, not the other way round.
- The CMS is shaped around how the team works, so publishing does not need a workaround.
- There is no unused framework code shipping to every visitor.
- When the business changes shape, the site can change with it rather than being rebuilt.
The cost question
It costs more up front. We do not pretend otherwise. What it saves is the second project. The one that happens in year three when the template has been stretched past what it was designed for and the only route forward is to start again.
Most of our clients are on their first Mojo site, years in. Starfish since 2018. Rally the Globe since 2018. Fellowes for six years. That is the actual argument, and it is not a design argument at all.
Three more
worth the time.
A client handed us an integration with 700,000 permissions and no living author. Here’s what we found, and what we’d want written into the next brief.
It is far easier to talk a client down from bold than to talk them up from safe. So we start further out than the final thing needs to be.
Account management exists to protect the people doing the work from the people paying for it. We took the opposite bet, and it changed how fast things move.