Are WordPress Templates and Simplified Builders Replacing Web Designers?

Whether you’re just considering taking up web design or worrying about your current job as a designer, at some point you might as yourself, “is the market stable enough for my career to keep growing?”

Have you ever seen pin boys in a bowling alley? Those who manually set the pins and return the balls to the players. I haven’t. Both my parents’ generation and mine were born after automatic pinsetters were invented and replaced pin boys by stealing their jobs. 

The same has happened repeatedly in our history: a machine is invented or some process is automated, and a whole job disappears. 

Now that it’s become so easy to build a website in minutes without special skills, some predict that this same thing will happen to web designers and web developers. 

Of course, making a website from scratch sounds appealing: only a few years ago it was the only option to get all the functionality you want, speed up your website from the get-go, and have that button in the exact shade and shape you need.

But now that there are thousands of optimized, responsive templates with endless possibilities to customize them with builders, both designers and developers stand against the big question.

And here comes the question: are WordPress templates and simplified builders replacing web designers?

To answer the question, let’s see what people get from builders and templates and then figure out if it’s all designers have to offer.
 

Why People Use Templates and Builders

There are some simple reasons to choose the new way of building websites. Here they go.

1. It’s fast

You don’t spend all that time going back and forth with a designer trying to get them to create what you want; you just sit down by yourself, choose a ready template, and customize it as you like. 
 

2. It’s easy

Special skills? A degree? Design software? You don’t need any of those. This way of creating a website is super intuitive. Plus, most builders and templates are ugly-proof: they just won’t let you alter the design enough to make it bad. 
 

3. It’s cheap

Instead of one person paying a designer for X hours of work, we now have thousands of users. This makes a website design much more affordable. And lots of templates and builders are just free. It’s another way of saving costs through mass production.
 

4. It’s diverse

Your first thought might be, well, isn’t the choice of ready-made websites narrow? Of course, imagination can run wild and create websites you would never be able to imagine. But the number of templates and design elements we can find in the market allows us to find almost anything we may need: from e-commerce sites with integrated payment systems to optimized galleries and much more.

Templates and builders look like true gifts, don’t they? But thousands, if not millions of web designers are still employed and the web design market seems to be growing pretty fast.

So what do web designers do that can’t be automized? What is it that makes the market grow?

Why Hire Web Designers

Even when you’re using something ready-made, you often need plenty of help. Here’s why.
 

1. Customization

If you really know what kind of a website you want, there will always be something, at least one thing, to customize. And even when your template is super ugly-proof with the most beautiful widgets, you might want to leave the choices to a professional.
 

2. Maintaining the Brand Identity

All in all, design is an entire profession, not just a few skills and tools. To make sure your easily-made website complies with all your brand guidelines, you might need professional help. However, in a lot of cases, a consult can be enough.
 

3. Developing New Mass Products

The company I work for employs 2 full-time UI/UX designers, sometimes joined by one or more contractors. Besides the 10Web dashboard, plugins, and lots of 10Web-related pages, they have designed multiple templates and widgets that will later be used customized by the end-user.
 

4. Non-Standard Sites and Pages

Ready-to-go websites are great for online stores, blogs, news outlets, poortfolios, and some other website categories. But they are not universal. You need a web designer for your new email system, your new social network, and the cool analytics tool you’re creating. 

So here’s what we conclude.
 

The Verdict

 
There are thousands of tools for non-professionals to do graphic design. Yet, it’s no threat to graphic design as a profession. There’s much more to it than the tools. And you don’t have to worry about web design either.
 
Web design as a profession is certainly not going to disappear in the foreseeable future. The demands change, the market shifts towards mass products, but in the end, a web designer that follows the market trends stays in the market.