In the main, I agree with what others have said, which is why, despite being able to do so, I too, rarely do websites any more. I will design them, but for more complex, dynamic sites, I’d get a developer involved every time. The field has become so involved, with the number of platforms and potential security risks that coding is a specialty all of its own, with its own set of skills and aptitudes. At the other end of the scale, I’d never get involved in putting a template site together and expect to be paid for it. Note, I didn’t use the word ‘design’, as there’s no design involved.
The other day, I had one of my existing clients come to me who is, personally, a published author and asked me to do a site for him. I told him I could, but actually for him, using something like wix or squarespace was the way to go. All he needed was a small brochure site that told the world who he was and what he does. No online selling required. I would have been erring towards fraudulent, not to mention, unethical to take his pennies, given how easy it is to set up a wixspace-type site and how effective they are now, for this sort of thing.
On the other hand, I had another client – a composer – wanting a bells and whistles cms site recently. Where, once upon a time, my knowledge of php would have allowed me to do this, these days it is the sort of thing I wouldn’t dream of doing without getting a developer involved. I’m happy to design it and then hand over the mechanics of it to someone who knows what they are doing.
All that said, I think there is a small space that sits between the two camps, where one option is not flexible enough and the other prohibitively expensive for their budget and overkill for their needs. I have a few clients for whom this is the case. It is the space Adobe Muse used to sit in.
One such client Is a medium-sized hotel who I have designed and developed a brand identity for, over the last few years. For their website, they wanted a bit more flexibility and had some specific requirements that template sites couldn’t offer, but didn’t require any dynamic content (beyond embedding third party hotel management software for bookings, etc). They felt, overall it was more cost-effective to pay me to make their infrequent updates, than to pay lots of pennies to have the options to do it themselves on the not hugely frequent occasions it was needed. They do need to update menus regularly, so the workaround for this was to have them as linked pdfs, they can just ftp up and replace the existing ones, as and when they need.
This is where Muse was useful (it even had a cms built in) and it’s demise left a bit of a gap. At the time when Adobe announced its demise, I researched quite a few alternatives; Pinegrow, Webflow, etc. In the end, despite its apparent simplicity, I settled on a piece of software called Sparkle. Terrible name, but surprisingly flexible. It is not expensive, however, it is Mac only. It does genuinely produce adaptive (though not responsive) sites with breakpoints that do look exactly the way you intend without having to get your hands dirty. They are also, just about to launch a new version, in the coming weeks, with many upgrades and improvements. It means that you can produce a site within a budget that simply won’t stretch to a fully bespoke, hand-coded, dynamic site.
Sparkle will also import Sketch files. I don’t use Sketch myself – though I have been thinking about getting it just to see how useful it is for prototyping, compared to Adobe’s XD, which I don’t really get on with. For those sites that fall between two stools, Sparkle is a great option and well worth looking at.
That said, if you are going to use any sort of wysiwyg software, I would still suggest learning, at very least, a basic level of html and css, so you understand how webpages work under the bonnet.
If you are not going to add value and just use template sites for client work, why should you get to take people’s money for something they can easily do themselves. For me that falls into the ethically-dubious, peddling of snake oil school of business practice and in addition, as Levi rightly said, you risk, becoming a jack of all trades.
I am not a fan of template sites, but they are pretty good these days and with some really good templates out there, as a designer, you add nothing for a client by using them. They serve a purpose.
I’d say, stick to what you know – or learn what you don’t.