To Template or Not To Template, That is the Question.

When you are starting out in web development, either for personal pleasure, a career transition, to freelance and make a little extra money, or another reason, you have a choice to make(actually many choices but this post is about one choice in particular). You must decide whether you are going to write your code for your website(s) from scratch by hand, or to use a pre-made template or starter kit.

So let me just start off by saying I have used a template on most of my more polished projects. For example, for my portfolio was heavily based on this blog post. Further, for a clients site seen here, I used this starter kit. The guy who made this starter kit(a phrase interchangeable with template) has made an updated version, seen here.

Okay now that we got that out of the way it is pretty clear I am #teamTemplate. I am going to do my best to remain impartial here as I argue both sides, though inevitably my bias will show at some points.

Pros #teamTemplate

1) It allows you to work faster.

Using a template allows you to get a head start on some of the code that you know will have to go in the project(responsive nav bar, hero section, styles set up).

2) It comes loaded with features.

The starter kit that I used for my clients website came with a lot of features which saved me a lot of time from having to code them myself. The responsive nav bar, dark mode toggle, built in multiple pages, button styles, hover effects were just some of the features that came built in to the kit.

3) Great if design is not your forte.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that using templates has actually made me better at design. For my portfolio, I liked the look of the templates but had some ideas on how to adjust it to make it mine and make it look better. Having a place to start allowed me to break through a creativity block easily. Further, if you look at the starter kit for my clients site and the finished product from my clients site there are definitely some similarities but there are a lot of differences. A lot of ideas came to me as I was building the site and the template allowed me to see things in a more complete way and helped with my designing.

Cons #teamNoTemp

1) You're not a real developer if you use templates.

All real developers write all of their code by hand, from scratch, on a stone tablet, by the light of a fire(that they lit themselves by hand). Okay, that was a bit exaggerative and outlandish but that is just because I do not believe this statement(here's my bias showing up), but have heard this as a reason not to use a template.

2) Templates are not good to learn for absolute beginners.

Templates are probably not great to learn for absolute beginners. Sure, looking at examples of good code may be helpful for those who somewhat know what they are doing. Absolute beginners may be lost looking at all of the code that is written in a template. Though, to be fair, absolute beginners probably are not at a point where they are building full polished projects like this.

3) All of your site will look the same.

If you use the same template, and only adjust the content and very few styles, then yes, all of your projects will look the same.

Let's wrap this thing up

Okay looking back this was more of a "I used templates on some of my projects and it went okay" rather than "Here are some equally argued reasons for an against the use of templates". Oh well. I guess I really am firmly #teamTemplate. Anyways, thanks for reading, bye for now.