In any venture designed around attracting new customers, presentation is essential. In the real world, businesses spend millions of dollars keeping their stores clean, organized, and inviting for their customers to make them feel comfortable. The same principle holds true in the virtual world. With any website or blog, your page layout functions as your store front, serving the same function of invitation and comfort; a viewer’s willingness to shop around with their eyeballs depends directly on the design of you site.

Creating an interesting page layout is extremely complicated however, and unless you are a professional web designer, to give your site a professional look, you will need to employ a template, of which there are two main varieties. For almost every web hosting site (BlogSpot, WordPress, Tumblr, to name a few), free themes are available, requiring nothing more than a few clicks to turn your pages into a well-crafted and unified site. The other option is a premium theme, offered at a price, but including much more customization and flexibility. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, largely depending on the aims of your site, though free theme options leave you with little opportunity for growth.

With a free theme, site owners get a plainly constructed, clean looking design, but little else. Layouts are fairly simple and viewers will have no trouble navigating through it. The downside is that they are fairly generic, and hold little to no functionality. If your site has little need for interaction, and is just deigned to clearly display basic content, then free themes will do the job.  However, if you want to give your viewers a unique and interesting experience, then paid themes are the much wiser choice. The level of customization with a premium theme is much higher, and owners have a much better ability to create a page that stands out from the vast multitude of bland ones.

For many, the prospect of buying a site layout can seem unneeded, even with the added functionality. Why bother spending money when a free option is available that looks clean and professional? Again, everything goes back to the purpose of your page, but only to a point. If you have any plans for growth, the free theme option quickly becomes inadequate. Every aspiring site owner wants their pages to grow in popularity, and in doing so, a free layout will become boring and uninteresting, unable to keep the attention of your now more demanding viewers.

If your plans for your site involve expansion, bringing in new visitors, and reaching a higher level of success, making the small investment into a paid theme will pay off exponentially in the long run, giving you a site that is unique, engaging, and able to hold the interest in your growing viewership.

Written by the marketing department for the Los Angeles injury attorneys at AA Accident Attorneys