Unpacking the Pitfalls of Off-the-Shelf Website Themes

Dear web professionals and website proprietors, please direct your attention here momentarily. We need to address a pressing issue within the realm of readymade website templates. Forgive my dramatic flair, but the situation merits it. There’s an undeniable dilemma tied to off-the-shelf website themes. Indeed, these themes are notorious for several flaws: ponderous code, forcing content to adapt to their rigid structures, among other issues. Yet, they have come a long way. Nowadays, themes are constructed with modularity in mind, allowing you to engage and load only the elements you need. Coders are mastering the art of efficiency to ensure speedy loading, and there appears to be a theme available for every unique requirement. Surely, unless your website attracts a crowd akin to Amazon’s, a standard hosting solution suffices, right? And again, with a theme for every need, the convenience is palpable. But this impression is largely mistaken.

Allow me to share an anecdote from February of 2018. Back then, I had some thoughts I was itching to express through writing, though there was no financial incentive behind it. Moreover, maintaining a blog on the subjects I was passionate about seemed impractical. I prefer projects with clear phases: a beginning, middle, and end, preferably with a deadline involved. So, I pondered over constructing several niche/authority websites on themes close to my heart. I reasoned that niche sites need not be slyly designed ad platforms with poor aesthetics and user experience. I could set a new standard. Once completed, these sites would require minimal maintenance. Plus, there was no need for a custom design—a pre-built wiki or knowledge base template for WordPress or a similar CMS would serve adequately.

I encountered numerous themes…and almost invested in them

During my quest for the perfect theme, I stumbled upon several that appealed to me, including some stunning premium options where I was tempted to spend my money. What a regrettable decision that would’ve been! My realization was this: each theme relied extensively on JavaScript for elementary functions such as content display, navigation, and search functionality. (Despite promising myself not to reiterate my stance on why an over-reliance on JavaScript is ill-advised, here I am again, unable to resist).

When you offer a theme dependent on JavaScript for basic operations, you are proposing a website prone to dysfunction under certain conditions. Be it a sluggish internet connection, a plugin conflict, unruly ad networks, or a simple browser glitch—such fragilities can lead to breakdowns. If we allow our daily digital tools to be so fragile, we create a significant accessibility barrier, and ultimately, we do our customers a disservice.

it’s essential to provide contingencies for every JavaScript element that could fail

To release ready-made templates without addressing these potential failings, especially with no warning, is troubling. Sometimes, it’s seasoned professionals looking for shortcuts who use these themes, but often, it’s novices with a cursory understanding of HTML. Furthermore, these wiki and knowledge base themes are destinations for users in dire need of assistance—customer support and educational platforms should be the last to encounter failures.

While the allure of snazzy visual flair is understood, and I don’t fault designers for leveraging such features to attract buyers, it is incumbent upon us to ensure robust fallback mechanisms for every JavaScript component. We need basic layouts, navigational elements, and forms to underpin any circumstance. While supporting outdated browsers isn’t expected, the fact remains that when JavaScript fails, it usually affects only a subset of end-users, but even that is significant. These could have been potential customers, and their loss is a reflection on us—the designers and developers.

Faced with this predicament, I am now compelled to craft my own wiki/knowledge-base styled theme, perhaps for Grav CMS, because someone has to set things right—and it might as well be me. As Taylor Swift aptly put it, “Look what you made me do.”