Throughout our lives, we’re taught that originality and creativity are some of the greatest talents a person can have. We’re taught that recreating or tweaking something is not nearly as noble a pursuit as creating something new, right from the structures of our own thoughts. However, in the business world, building everything from scratch is not always time-effective or cost-effective. That’s where template development comes into the equation.

It’s a matter of fact that when it comes to business, time really is money. You may love the idea of building a gorgeous website template all on your own, or of designing an entire company brochure from scratch, using nothing but your own design inspiration to bring it to life. However, the fact is that these pursuits take a lot of time, and unless you have true graphic design skills and experience, they probably aren’t going to come out looking as impressive (and more importantly, professional) as you want them to.

There are several alternatives to this DIY, “from scratch” approach. The first is that you hire an expensive graphic design expert to spice up your websites, create your brochures, and add some pizzazz to your business cards. If you take this path, you’ll get great looking, thoroughly professional marketing materials that everyone will love.

There’s only one problem with this approach: it’s expensive, and if you’re a company with limited funds, or a business that creates a lot of different brochures or programs for different trade shows and events, you could find your graphic design bill getting a bit too hefty.

The second alternative is to take advantage of template development. Instead of creating images and marketing materials from scratch (or of having your bill-by-the-hour graphic designer do it), you can have a designer develop templates that you can then fill in with information and visuals. Templates can be developed for virtually anything you may need, be it a website page, a flyer, a brochure, or a business card. The point is, once you have the template, you’ll be able to use it over and over again, getting professional and uniform marketing materials for your business at a fraction of what you would spend on repeated “from scratch” development.

Need proof that template development works? Plenty of websites make use of inexpensive templates already, from newspaper sites built on WordPress to entertainment websites built from templates on Wix