I have personally tried both methods in designing websites and I can tell you that a premade template designed website has no advantages over a custom designed website.

Yet, all the disadvantages.

As far as time goes a good graphic designers can have you a website built in a couple hours, the same amount of time it will take you to buy, download and figure out the template site.

You’ll need all kinds of programs to modify a template website and we’ve bought templates in the past that professional web designers couldn’t figure out how to modify. To make it even more fun if you have a problem with a template website you will find that most template sites don’t have phone numbers on their sites…so you’ll need to submit a ticket.

On the good side I can tell you that the longest we’ve ever had to wait for an answer (when we’ve submitted a ticket for a template problem) was 103 hours. That’s about 5 days, less time than it would take to have a custom designed website with a CMS installed, put online, spidered and ranked in the search engines.

Another problem with buying premade templates is that software like wordpress, osCommerce and just about any other open source software template sites sell templates for is being updated constantly.

So…there is always the chance that the template you just bought isn’t going to work with the latest version of software you are wanting to use it on.

And you always need to use the latest version of software as there is normally a reason that it has been updated.