Nick1973:
In all honesty I'm not a great fan of the picaflor azul templates for all sorts of reasons, which is a personal choice. I find they often don't work quite as well as they should and particularly from a design and layout perspective. So I don't think there is anything wrong with writing my own template to suit my requirements.
There's a lot I dislike about the "style" choices picaflor have made which is embedded into practically all their templates. But "style" features are very easy to remove and/or reshape. First thing I do with any template I get is to remove features that don't play well in the desktop/mobile "crossover". Mobile compliance is now more important than Desktop compliance, but template authors still seem to build for desktop, then bolt on bits that help it render on mobile.
It is believed that by 2020, almost 90% of interactive/transactional activity will happen on mobile devices - certainly in B2C environments, which is where most website owners using opensource platforms are active. Hence Google pushing the AMP protocol. Sites that are heavy in JS and CSS are already struggling to get to Google's preferred target of under 2 seconds for pagespeed.
Also, the way people use websites (especially for making purchases) has changed dramatically in recent years. With Google now increasingly capable of presenting search results which more and more accurately reflect what someone is looking for, people like to get straight to the page where they see on offer, exactly what they are looking for. So when they land on that page, the faster, simpler and easier it is to use, the more likely they are to not only stay-on-page, but also to expand their visit while they are there. They have no time for irritating banners, popups, slide-outs, and all these other techniques that remain popular with site owners (and developers - who are usually not very good at marketing and selling, and who know little about stuff like UX).
Templates should therefore achieve the following:
- Be designed for mobile use, first and foremost.
- Avoid using features that rely heavily on css and js.
- Incorporate semantic data-markup, so search engines can more accurately determine the nature AND INTENT of page content.
- Be clean and simple, with the main feature of any rendered page being largely what the visitor is expecting it to be.
Since we simplified all our websites (and those we continue to support for other customers)we have seen:
- Bounce rate drop to BELOW 2% on almost all sites. No site has a bounce rate over 5%.
- Time-On-Site (average) move to 6 minutes from 2 minutes.
- Since 2013, a 450% increase in return visits. (And corresponding repeat/new orders).
- Average pageviews (per session) increase from 7 to 22.
- Order value increases of between 40% and 60% (depending on the site and products being sold).
So... to us... it's not really about the template as much as it is about making things cleaner, faster, easier and more focused, for the end user. That is our only benchmark for whether the technology is "good" or "indadequate".
We try lots of templates (both in their original form and customised) and if they don't first achieve a pageload speed of 2.5 seconds or less across a series of tests, we toss them out. Then, those we keep must achieve under 2 seconds. We use pingdom and gtmetrix as our main testing platforms for this purpose - not Google, who has "ulterior motives" in reporting "underperformance".
