A/B testing original design vs. random template bought from ThemeForest
I don&#x27;t think this is necessarily the right conclusion.<p>Imagine a friend with a cafe, they get the opportunity to get another cafe, same area, same clientele. With the new cafe they decide to just get some franchise, a Subway type of thing. People are familiar with it and flock there in relative droves. The original &#x27;ma and pa&#x27; cafe is therefore deemed to be not as good as a &#x27;template&#x27;.<p>The other option to the franchise could have been to have gone with the &#x27;ma and pa&#x27; offering, same deal.<p>But that is not all of the choices. You could actually create something new, not hold with what you have or chuck it in and go with the &#x27;franchise&#x27;.<p>With website design it is very easy for people to chuck it in and go with a Themeforest effort, Shopify, Squarespace and the like.<p>But a lot of &#x27;new ingredients&#x27; have came along with CSS Grid, semantic markup and much else that the themes, &#x27;serviced websites&#x27; and the like are not up to speed with yet and show no signs of wanting to implement.<p>It is also possible to build out more than just a landing page from scratch in two weeks with the new tools. This involves learning instead of botching someone else&#x27;s floats, divs and margin hacks. We have Cargo Cult programming and in my opinion this story is just another example of this.<p>I would recommend anyone else in this position to start content first, not buying a theme and then taking the photos needed to push in the theme because the boxes are there already. This is a backwards, &#x27;design led&#x27; process and there are plenty of good reasons to go content first, then structure it properly, spend a day or two with CSS grid, then put the existing branding on there. A static HTML page is a good start, a working prototype instead of a PDF mockup.<p>Then, instead of the A&#x2F;B testing, ask an honest person who knows a thing or two and won&#x27;t bullshit you. They will ask &#x27;why have you done that&#x27; questions which will get the content in shape. Thereafter, once you have a go at doing it you can spot what you like elsewhere and learn from it rather than cargo-cult-copy-paste it to never be confident of anything.