The first thing every new client asks is, sensibly, “Do you have a template we could start from?” It is a reasonable question. Templates are cheap, fast, and predictable. They also produce websites that are cheap, fast, and predictable in exactly the wrong ways.
A template is a frozen answer to a question someone else was asked. It encodes a hierarchy of attention — what is large, what is small, what comes first — for an audience and a product that is not yours. Adapting a template is, in our experience, almost always slower than starting from a sheet of grid paper, because most of the work is undoing decisions that were made for someone else.
There is an honest version of the template argument, and we believe in it: a small studio with a defined system can produce work faster on the second project than on the first. That is not the same as selling the same site twice. We have a design system. We have a build system. We do not have a template.
When we begin a project, we begin with the brief — a written document of two to four pages, distilled from interviews with the people who run the business. We begin with type. We begin with the words. The layout follows the type, the type follows the words, and the words follow the work the business actually does. This is the long way around. It is also the only way.
If you are reading this and considering a template-driven build for your business, we will not try to talk you out of it. We will, however, point out that you are buying a coat off a rack, and that bespoke is not, on a per-month basis over a five-year ownership window, all that much more expensive.