Web Design: The Template Trap (And What It's Really Costing You)

You've changed the template four times. You've watched the tutorials. You've read the articles about "what makes a great homepage" and dutifully added the hero image, the three-column feature section, the testimonials, the call to action button in a contrasting colour.

It looks like a website. It looks like everyone's website.

And something in you dies every time you open it. That feeling isn't incompetence. It's intelligence. You're noticing something true - that you've built a website that could belong to anyone, which means it belongs to no one, which means it isn't actually yours.

No one expects you to know what makes a website “good,” even though every site out there acts like you should. Websites aren’t neutral; they carry assumptions about who clicks, who scrolls, and how long attention lasts. Some are built for speed, some for efficiency, most for someone else’s bottom line. And yet, the patterns they follow, aka: “best practices,” aren’t magic. They’re a language, one you can learn, one you already have the instincts for, even if the tech feels alien. Understanding it doesn’t make you a coder; it makes you a human who finally gets how to shape a space that feels both clear and alive for your visitors.

The Template Problem Isn't Technical

When you chose that template (Squarespace, Wordpress, Wix, or Shopify, or whatever), you were inheriting a set of assumptions about who you are, who your people are, and what the relationship between you should look like. Those assumptions are baked so deep you can't see them. But you can feel them. The assumptions go something like this:

• Your visitor is in a hurry. They won't read. They'll skim, scroll, and leave within eight seconds unless you CAPTURE THEIR ATTENTION with a BIG HEADLINE and guide them - quickly, simply, without asking too much - toward a button.
  

• Your visitor is comparison shopping. They have twelve tabs open. You must prove your value immediately, with social proof and credibility markers and "as featured in" logos.
  

• Your visitor doesn't trust you. So you must perform trustworthiness through design conventions: the clean layout, the professional photography, the copy that sounds like copy.

Notice what's underneath all of this? A deep suspicion of the person you're trying to reach. The template assumes they're distracted, skeptical, impatient, and slightly stupid. Maybe some visitors are. But are those your people?

What If Your People Are Different?

Here's what I've noticed about the small business owners I work with - the therapists and coaches and consultants and makers - clients, who feel like misfits in the online world:

• Their best clients aren't comparison shopping.
  

• They're looking for resonance.
  

• They want to feel something, understand something, sense that this person gets it before they ever book a call.
  

• Their best clients will read. Not everyone will. But the ones who matter - the ones who become long-term clients, who refer others, who are a joy to work with - those people read. They want to know how you think.

Their best clients don't need to be captured. They need to be invited. But too many websites are built for capture. And so you keep trying to make yourself fit a container designed for a completely different kind of business, wondering why it feels so wrong.

The Dirty Secret of "Best Practices"

Here's where it gets uncomfortable. Everything the templates assume? It's based on data. Real data. People do bounce in three seconds. They don't read. Short copy does convert better than long copy, in aggregate, on average, across millions of generic transactions.

Best practices are best because they work. For most businesses, most of the time, optimising for the distracted visitor is the right call. But "most businesses" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

If you're selling commodity products to strangers, yes - optimise for speed and simplicity. Make it frictionless. Assume nothing. But if you're selling yourself - your thinking, your attention, your particular way of seeing and solving - then friction might be the point. Someone who won't read 500 words won't sit through a strategy session. Someone who needs everything explained with icons and bullet points won't appreciate nuance in your work.

The template is optimising for everyone. You need to optimise for your people - even if that means letting others bounce.

What Changes When You Stop Apologising

I'm not going to tell you to burn your Squarespace down and hand-code something artisanal. That's not the point. The point is this: you have permission to make different choices.

You can write more than three words on your homepage.

You can assume intelligence.

You can let your personality leak through in ways that feel unprofessional by someone else's standards.

You can have a website that doesn't look like a website, because what you do doesn't look like what anyone else does. You can design for the reader you actually want, not the distracted stranger the internet has trained you to fear. What does this look like in practice?

• Let your voice in. Not a "brand voice" developed from a worksheet - your actual voice. The way you'd explain what you do to a friend who asked at dinner. The warmth, the pauses, the things you find funny. If it feels risky, you're probably getting close.
  

• Say more, not less. Not everything needs to be a tweet. If your work is complex, honour that complexity. The right people will stay. The wrong people will leave. Both of those are good outcomes.
  

• Make them curious, not convinced. You don't need to overcome objections and prove value in the first scroll. You need to make someone want to keep reading. Intrigue beats persuasion, for the clients worth having.
  

• Let it be a bit weird. Not weird for weird's sake. But if something about how you work or think is unusual, that's not a liability to be smoothed away. It's the whole point.

The Underlying Question

This isn't really about websites. It's about what happens when we design everything - our interfaces, our businesses, our communication - for the lowest common denominator? We train people to expect less. Then we give them less because they expect it. The attention span we're designing for keeps shrinking, because we keep shrinking it.

Somewhere in this cycle, we lost something. The patience for things that take time to reveal themselves. The pleasure of discovering rather than being captured. The respect - mutual respect - between someone offering something and someone receiving it.

I don't think we get that back by everyone building boutique hand-coded websites. That's not realistic and it's not the point. But I do think we get some of it back by refusing to assume the worst about the people we're trying to reach. Your website doesn't have to be clever. It doesn't have to be minimalist or maximal or follow any particular trend. It just has to be yours - built on the assumption that your people are smart, curious, and willing to stay a while. That's the only business worth doing.

---

I help small business owners build websites that sound like them and attract the clients they actually want. If your current site makes you cringe, let's talk. I'm at ann@greataveruins.com