Templates and Looking Like Everybody Else

Why templates all look alike

A theme ships with a demonstration site: photographs, headings, section arrangement, and placeholder text.

That demonstration is designed to look good, so the temptation is to change as little as possible.

Most buyers change the logo, the colour, and the words, and leave everything else.

Which means several thousand businesses have sites sharing the same photographs, the same section order, and the same rhythm.

What actually makes them recognisable

• The demonstration photographs.
• The default typeface.
• The section order from the demo.
• Icon sets shipped with the theme.
• Stock headings like Our Process.
• Spacing and proportions left untouched.

The first does most of the work. Somebody who has seen that photograph on three other sites recognises the theme immediately, and everything else on the page is read in that light.

The four changes that matter

Which are cheap and rarely made.

Replace every demonstration photograph with your own, even where yours are less polished, because a real photograph of your own work beats a better photograph of somebody else's.

Change the typeface, which is a single setting and alters the character of a page more than any other change.

Rewrite the headings in your own words rather than keeping the theme's generic ones.

And reorder or remove sections, since the demo order was designed for a fictional business.

Those four take an afternoon and make a common theme unrecognisable.

Typography does the most

Worth separating, since it is the least obvious of the four.

Themes ship with a typeface chosen to be safe, which means it is the same one thousands of other sites are using.

Changing it, and adjusting the size and line spacing, changes how every page feels without touching the layout.

Pick something plain rather than distinctive, since a personality typeface dates quickly and a well-set ordinary one does not.

Set the body text a little larger than the theme default, which almost always improves it.

That is one setting and it is the highest-return change available on a template site.

A worked example

A business bought a well-known theme and launched it with the demonstration photographs still in place.

A customer mentioned having seen the same photograph on another local business's site, which was accurate.

They replaced eleven images with their own, changed the typeface, rewrote four section headings into plain descriptions of what they did, and removed two sections that existed only because the demo had them.

The theme was unchanged and the site was unrecognisable as one.

The whole exercise took a day and cost nothing beyond the time.

Nobody has mentioned recognising it since.

Remove what the demo included

Since a theme demonstrates features rather than serving a business.

Themes ship with sections for things a fictional business might want: a team of six, a counter of statistics, a set of client logos, a newsletter box.

Businesses keep those and fill them awkwardly: two team members in a six-person grid, invented statistics, a newsletter nobody sends.

Delete anything you cannot fill honestly, since an empty or padded section is worse than its absence.

That usually shortens the home page considerably, which is an improvement on its own.

Colour is the change people make and the least effective

Worth naming, since it is almost always the first thing changed and almost never enough.

Swapping the theme's blue for your own green alters nothing structural, and the site remains recognisable to anybody who has seen the theme.

It also frequently makes things worse, since the theme's palette was chosen so its text passed contrast and a substituted colour may not.

Check the contrast of any colour you introduce, particularly for button text and for anything on a coloured background.

Change the colour if you want to, and treat it as branding rather than as differentiation, because it does very little of the second.

The theme is not the reason it is not working

Worth saying plainly, since this gets blamed.

A generic-looking site with real photographs, real prices, and real reviews outperforms a bespoke one with none of those.

Nobody has ever declined to contact a business because they recognised the theme, and plenty have declined because they could not find a price.

So the differentiation worth pursuing is in the content rather than the container.

Make the four changes because they are cheap, and put the remaining effort into what the pages actually say.

Choosing one in the first place

A few criteria that matter more than appearance.

Whether it is actively maintained, since an abandoned theme becomes a security problem.

How much it loads, since some themes carry a great deal of code for features you will not use.

Whether it works properly on a phone, tested rather than claimed.

And whether you can change the typography and spacing without editing code.

Appearance is the easiest of those to change later and the one people choose on.

Keep a record of what you changed

The practical consequence of building on somebody else's theme.

Updates overwrite theme files, so a change made by editing the theme directly disappears the next time it is updated and takes your customisation with it.

Make changes through the theme's own settings where possible, and where they have to be in code, use the mechanism the platform provides for keeping them separate.

Ask whoever built it which of those was used, since the answer determines whether updating is safe.

Then write down the handful of changes made, so that if an update does undo something, somebody knows what is missing rather than discovering it months later.

The counter-case

Themes are a good idea.

For a small business, a maintained theme is faster, cheaper, more reliable, and better tested than most bespoke work available at the same price.

Looking similar to other businesses matters far less than most owners fear, since almost no visitor has seen those other sites.

And heavy customisation can break updates, which is a real cost for a cosmetic gain.

Replace the photographs, change the typeface, rewrite the headings, delete what you cannot fill, and stop there.

The afternoon

1. Replace every demo photograph.
2. Change the typeface.
3. Increase the body text size.
4. Rewrite the section headings.
5. Delete sections you cannot fill honestly.
6. Reorder what remains.
7. Put the effort into the content.

Step one is the change that removes recognition, since the demonstration photograph is what somebody who has seen the theme elsewhere actually recognises.

The same argument about generated content is covered in why the result reads like everybody else's.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.