But you’re using a free wordpress template! Why?

There’s a few reasons why I chose to use a freely available template instead of designing my own template for wordpress.

• It lets you launch your blog faster
  This is fundamental, if you use a template you can start writing your content quicker, and get your site into search engines faster. If you take your time to build out the content rather than the template, then you’ll start getting visitors. So if you have a blog idea, just get on with it.
• It’s less expensive
  By that I mean yes, the blog template is free, but your time isn’t free, so you can get it done quicker.
• Most of the hard work is done for you
  This blog template has a lot of features that would take me a long time to build in, so yes, even though I could do it, I don’t like re-inventing things unless I have to. This one has ajax comments, SEO urls, and many other features built in that I hadn’t thought of.
• It’s easily customised.
  If you use a template, it’s easy to customise, once again, your time is precious, so using a template is the quickest and easiest way to get blogging. Once you build a readership you can think about building out your own template. In fact, I’m building out a template for this blog at the moment. Of course you can stick with the template and customise it to your needs, I’ve changed the background and the logo, and I’ll probably be customizing some of the colours, fonts, etc, in the near future.

So those are the reasons I used a template. The total time from me thinking of a blog idea, to implementation was approximately 1 hour. If I’d gone the design and build route, it would have taken me weeks.