This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hey there, what's up? Welcome to Sato School. Welcome as well to a brand new week. We have a subset of listeners who are tuning in every day, following along in real time, which I think is so cool. And of course, we also have a bunch of folks who listen whenever it's convenient to them. They
listen to several episodes at a time or sometimes a lot of episodes at a time. I did my best to make the show as relevant and evergreen as possible so that you can listen in whatever way is best for you. Now, I also wanted to mention that I always enjoy hearing what you're up to. Let me know about your projects. This is a very organic project of my own. It never was a huge strategy to make
1,668 episodes in a row. I committed to doing it for 365 episodes and then it was just so much fun that I kept going and I've connected with so many amazing people along the way. So if we are not connected online, you can follow me on Twitter. It's just my name at chrisgillibo, G-U-I-L-L-E-B-E-A-U. You can connect on LinkedIn. I actually have several LinkedIn learning courses that are totally free
if you have a premium account there or a lynda.com account and I should also be releasing some new ones soon. Lots of different ways to connect but the point is I would love to know what you're up to. Now, today's listener in our Q&A episode, today's listener is wondering about using a website template to build his new e-commerce site. It looks cheap, quick, and easy which are, of course, three good things. Is there any downside? That's what he's wondering. That's what we're going to talk about
after this quick message from our sponsor. Thank you, sponsor, and thank you listeners. Hey, Chris. This is Kevin and I've registered a domain and want to build a website without coding. It looks like there's a bunch of templates and plugins out there that make this easy either for free or sometimes a low cost of $100 or less. Is there anything wrong with using one of
these tools? I worry that it might look unprofessional but I also don't have a lot of money to spend on design and I don't think I'll turn into a programmer overnight. What do you think I should do? Thanks. Kevin, good news. There is very little downside especially for
your first website or for an e-commerce experiment or really all kinds of other reasons if you're not sure if you want to invest a ton in a project. You're just trying to figure out how can I go to market quickly. Like I said, all kinds of reasons. No problem at all with these website templates and themes. It's just getting easier and easier to get something up which I think is great.
The only question is when do you want to invest in branding and custom design? The answer is when it becomes more important to you and you have some resources to spend. Just want to be clear because we have a lot of designers out there. I'm not saying that good design is not worth investing in. I think it absolutely is in certain situations but for situations like Kevin's, which are very common, a lot of people just starting out trying something to see what happens, a stock template is absolutely just fine. Here's a little tip.
If you want to level up a bit, use the stock template which may be free or less than $100 and get a custom logo or otherwise do some small personalization or customization. That will cost more than $0 but it's very, very different from a full-on design which is going to cost a lot of money or like Kevin says, he's not going to turn into a programmer overnight. Just a way to kind of level up a bit without spending a lot of money but absolutely nothing wrong with using these templates. Cheap, quick and easy. As I said, all three good things so go for it. Let us know what happens, Kevin. Listeners, if you've got a
question of your own, sidehustleschool.com/questions, we will continue to feature them several times a week along with updates from listeners as they launch their projects. Thank you for being part of this collective global experiment. You're amazing. I'll be back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
