When you’re looking for a new home, you can’t help but to judge each house by its facade. The facade of a house is often the most important aspect from a design perspective, as it sets the tone for the rest of the property.
If the facade is pristine and there’s a green manicured lawn in front, you’ll think highly of the residence and you’ll want to see more of it. Conversely, if you come to stand in front of a decrepit house, you’ll keep moving without any consideration.
The same thing applies to websites.
Your website, or your client’s website, is the first thing that customers see.
And you want them to get the right first impression.
In this article, we’ll focus on the five best web design templates and themes that most web developers use. They’re easy to implement, and provide great results for a variety of clients.
We’ll cover their pros and cons, as well as use cases, so you can choose the best web design templates or themes for yourself or your clients.
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If we’re all so aware of the importance of web design, why do we still come across websites with random themes?
Surely, the only piece of online real estate you and your clients truly own needs more attention.
Unfortunately, many clients either choose themes that don’t offer the functionality they need, or they’re hesitant to pay for a web developer to build a theme that fits their needs perfectly.
This results in websites that feel poorly made and are hacked together with plugins to make up for the lack of features.
This is especially common with WordPress websites.
Ultimately, when your client’s customers visit the website, their user experience will suffer.
As soon as they land on a website that feels unfinished, uncared for, or hard to navigate, they will be less likely to trust the company behind it.
If nothing else, that translates to a lot of lost revenue.
But with a great web design template, you and your clients will be able to improve customers’ user experience and attract more paying customers.
So if the clients don’t want to pay for hundreds of hours of code that you’d need to create a design template from scratch, what can you do?
The easiest and quickest thing to do is to use one of the best web design templates and themes described in this blog post.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to bury yourself under mountains of code to create a beautiful website.
Depending on your clients’ needs, you can use:
Of course, there are some cases where your clients’ needs are so unique that you can’t help but to build a theme from scratch.
However, in the majority of cases, you will save a lot of time and money by implementing the solutions that already exist.
In this post, we’re going to show you five of the best web design templates and themes that you can customize, and make sure your clients are getting the most bang for their buck.
The best thing about using one of the best web design templates is the fact that you can focus on strategy:
Keep in mind that clients are actually looking to get a solution. They don’t care if they get a website made from scratch, or a modified template that serves its purpose.
All they care about are results.
So when you’re considering potential solutions, keep your clients’ needs in mind.
One of the quickest ways of getting them results is by using one of the best web design templates and themes recommended in this article.
Elegant Themes for WordPress is one of the most widely used themes. It’s versatile; both institutions and bloggers can use it to create beautiful and functional websites.
Its main perk is that it comes with an integrated drag & drop page builder: Divi.
The main benefit of Elegant Themes and the visual page builder, Divi, is that you can do everything on the front end. You don’t have to switch tabs between back-end code and front-end presentation.
Instead, what you see is what you (and your clients) will get. You can easily preview changes for the clients. Forget about InVision wireframes. Everything you need is right there in Divi.
Clients are expecting the drag & drop approach moving forward. After seeing platforms like Squarespace and Wix, and being able to adjust things with a simple drag and drop of particular modules, clients want web design to be simple.
Divi itself comes with over 800 pre-made templates, so if you and your clients see something that you like, you can simply implement it. New layouts are added every week, as well as royalty-free elements. It’s all included in the license fee.
If you work with a lot of similar clients, you’ll be happy to know that as soon as you pay for one license, you can create an unlimited number of themes.
Elegant Themes and Divi are one of the best examples of page builders, but they do come with a few cons.
Use Cases for Elegant Themes (Divi):
Pricing:
If your clients want you to focus on results, Thrive Themes are a great choice for their websites. Promoted as conversion-focused WordPress themes and plugins, Thrive Themes offer a variety of features for next-gen business owners.
Thrive Themes offer a variety of other features and products that increase conversion rates:
All in all, Thrive Themes offer more than web design templates.
The company provides well-rounded marketing and conversion rate optimization features, all embedded into the themes you create for your clients.
Similarly to other page builders such as Divi, Thrive Themes’ Architect comes with a variety of pre-loaded modules. The majority of them are specifically focused on improving conversions.
With a variety of plugins created specifically to get your clients the results they want to see from their website, Thrive Themes is a great fit for creating highly-marketable and successful websites that earn money.
Use Cases for Thrive Themes:
If you work with clients who want to improve their conversion rates with the websites you make, or clients who sell through their websites, Thrive Themes are a great choice.
Pricing:
Thrive membership starts from $19/month for up to 25 sites.
Elementor is the world’s leading WordPress page builder.
Just like other WP page builders, Elementor offers plenty of pre-made modules you can drag and drop to your clients’ sites to customize them as you see fit.
Again, this saves a lot of time you’d have otherwise spent coding. Instead, you can focus on creating the solutions your clients want to see.
Elementor comes in two versions: free and pro.
In the free version, you’ll be able to use the drag & drop builder. However, there are a few caveats: you don’t get the WooCommerce Builder (indispensable for eCommerce sites), Theme Builder, or the Popup Builder.
Now, other page builders we’ve discussed come equipped with pre-made themes. Elementor doesn’t. It’s only a page builder.
If you want a theme that works with Elementor, you should get one on ThemeForest.
The site has hundreds of Elementor-ready themes. A popular theme used with Elementor is Astra, which is one of the fastest growing themes of all time!
Just like other page builders, Elementor is a great fit for clients that want to be able to easily customize their sites. And on the web design front, you’ll save a lot of time by creating beautiful websites on the front end.
The folks at Elementor even promise you won’t have to struggle with bloated code. Everything is compressed for improved speed and user experience.
However, the speed really depends on the features you’ll add to the website.
Use Cases for Elementor Web Design:
Elementor is pretty flexible, so you can use it for any kind of website.
However, it’s mainly used for smaller sites that don’t require you to create hundreds of pages. You can also use it for affiliate sites or eCommerce websites.
Pricing:
Elementor Pro starts at $49/year for one site, and $199/year for up to 1,000 sites.Unlike other page builders, which tend to speak directly to business owners who want to make and customize their own sites, Beaver Builder has a strong background in the developer community.
Overall, Beaver Builder is a great fit for simple websites that can stay within Beaver Builder’s basic features. For example, it doesn’t offer portfolio modules like other page builders. This means that you’ll have to dive into CSS for every additional feature Beaver Builder isn’t offering.
However, if you often create simple websites with an emphasis on functionality, you may find you’re not missing the fancy stuff all that much.
It all depends on your clients.
Beaver Builder is a great option for creating blogging and affiliate marketing websites, especially if you spring for additional plugins that give you more features than BB’s core offer.
Pricing:
Beaver Builder starts at $99/year.
If you want to sell like crazy, ClickFunnels is a great option.
The majority of website builders offer a lot of features with no precise focus.
ClickFunnels, on the other hand, offers sharp focus on the one thing that matters: selling your products.
With ClickFunnels, you’ll be able to create sales funnel pages.
ClickFunnels is not a website builder, per se, but it gives you everything you and your clients need to sell through your website. It’s perfect for commerce websites. And when you consider some of its other features, you’ll have a sales toolbox before you’ve clicked “Subscribe.”
ClickFunnels’ features include:
And much more.
ClickFunnels Use Cases:
There’s no way around it: ClickFunnels is the perfect website builder for web designers and clients who want to make money with their websites.
In addition to providing a drag & drop visual builder, ClickFunnels also provides sales tools.
The website is integrated with your sales process, which makes it really easy to advance your customers through the funnel and win more sales.
However, if that’s not what you’re building the website for, you may want to check out other page builders.
You can also use ClickFunnels as a landing page builder. It’s great for building landing pages for webinars and other products. You can generate a lot of high-converting leads since the first page they land on will be created to drive them towards making a purchase.
In general, ClickFunnels are used successfully by marketers, affiliate marketers, and numerous businesses that have short sales cycles.
Pricing:
You now understand the importance of having a great design for your website and the five best web design templates and themes for you and your clients.
And now I’d like to turn it over to you:
Which web design template or theme option will you choose?
If you're already using one of these themes, page builders or plugins, what has your experience been like so far?
Or maybe you have a question.
Either way, leave a comment below right now.
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As seen on Fox Business News, Entrepreneur, and other national media outlets, Hahna Kane Latonick has founded Invent With Code to help web developers go from $0 to $10K with their freelance developer business over 90 days, so that they have more time, money, and freedom to live life on their own terms.