Template, Custom, Or Shopify?Match It To How You Sell.

The Honest Case For A DIY Template

Squarespace, Wix, Wordpress themes, GoDaddy builders — a web designer is supposed to trash them, and we won’t. A modern builder gives you a page that loads, works on a phone, and looks tidy, for less than a hundred dollars a month and a weekend of your time. If you’re brand new, cash-tight, and the alternative is no website, a template you actually finish beats a custom site you keep meaning to commission. One contractor we audited had owned his domain for months while it sat parked, showing his registrar’s ads to every customer who typed it. A finished template would have been infinitely better.

Where The Template Ends

Three ceilings, and none of them is “templates are bad at SEO” — the technical SEO of the big builders is fine these days. The real ones:

• It reads like everyone else. The template was designed to fit any business, so it commits to none. A homeowner comparing three plumbers sees the same hero photo, the same layout, the same “quality you can trust.” Nothing signals this one is real.
• You are the webmaster now. The monthly fee buys software, not attention. Every page, every update, every “why does the form go to spam” is your Saturday. Most owner-built sites we tear down were last touched the month they launched.
• The findability work still doesn’t exist. A site — any site — is one of three layers. The profile, citation, and review work that decides the map pack and the proof that makes people pick you aren’t in the box, from any builder, at any price.

What Semi-Custom Means Here

Fully custom design from a blank page costs five figures anywhere honest, and most local service businesses don’t need it. Our answer is eight design systems built trade by trade — plumbing, roofing, HVAC, landscaping, contracting, dental, law, salon — each with its own layout logic for how that trade sells: emergency-first for plumbers, proof-first for roofers. Your build starts from your trade’s system and becomes yours — your jobs, your service area, your words. That’s how a $1,000 Launch build is possible: the design thinking happened once, properly, and you don’t re-buy it. The $2,500 Business Growth tier adds custom visual direction, service landing pages, booking and intake forms, and local SEO wiring.

When The Answer Is Shopify

The moment you sell products — physical goods, inventory, carts, checkout — stop looking at brochure-site tools. Shopify handles payments, tax, shipping, abandoned carts, and discounts as first-class features, and it’s where our own ecommerce client work lives. We build stores on it ($3,500, up to 25 products) rather than fighting it with plugins bolted onto a brochure platform. The subscription is Shopify’s price, not ours — check their pricing page for current numbers.

When It’s None Of The Above

Customer portals, memberships, scheduling systems, dashboards, anything wired into other software — that’s custom platform work, quoted by milestone (from $8,000). If someone quotes you $1,500 for it, they’re planning to duct-tape plugins together and you’ll pay the difference later, in outages.

The Part That Matters More Than The Platform

We’ve never torn down a site whose real problem was the platform. The problems are always the same regardless of what it’s built on: nobody can find it, it doesn’t say what the business does or where, there’s no proof a real human does good work, and the phone number takes three taps to reach. Whatever you buy — template, semi-custom, Shopify — judge it by whether it fixes those. The platform is the cheapest decision on this page to get wrong; the findability work is the expensive one.