I don't think this is necessarily the right conclusion.
Imagine a friend with a cafe, they get the opportunity to get another cafe, same area, same clientele. With the new cafe they decide to just get some franchise, a Subway type of thing. People are familiar with it and flock there in relative droves. The original 'ma and pa' cafe is therefore deemed to be not as good as a 'template'.
The other option to the franchise could have been to have gone with the 'ma and pa' offering, same deal.
But that is not all of the choices. You could actually create something new, not hold with what you have or chuck it in and go with the 'franchise'.
With website design it is very easy for people to chuck it in and go with a Themeforest effort, Shopify, Squarespace and the like.
But a lot of 'new ingredients' have came along with CSS Grid, semantic markup and much else that the themes, 'serviced websites' and the like are not up to speed with yet and show no signs of wanting to implement.
It is also possible to build out more than just a landing page from scratch in two weeks with the new tools. This involves learning instead of botching someone else's floats, divs and margin hacks. We have Cargo Cult programming and in my opinion this story is just another example of this.
I would recommend anyone else in this position to start content first, not buying a theme and then taking the photos needed to push in the theme because the boxes are there already. This is a backwards, 'design led' process and there are plenty of good reasons to go content first, then structure it properly, spend a day or two with CSS grid, then put the existing branding on there. A static HTML page is a good start, a working prototype instead of a PDF mockup.
Then, instead of the A/B testing, ask an honest person who knows a thing or two and won't bullshit you. They will ask 'why have you done that' questions which will get the content in shape. Thereafter, once you have a go at doing it you can spot what you like elsewhere and learn from it rather than cargo-cult-copy-paste it to never be confident of anything.
How many successful businesses have you launched doing things “the right way”?
The point is there are many paths to success. Maybe candy japan didn’t do things the way you think they should be done (it’s frankly rude to refer to template hacking as cargo cult programming; we’re talking design here, not programming). But despite their “primitive approach”, they’ve been successful in multiple ways.
OP has taught me quite a bit with their experience, whereas your negative tone has taught me nothing except you believe you know how things should be done.
I get your point, but have you ever found a theme that hasn't came along with an extraordinary amount of bloat, technical debt and featuritis?
Have you ever worked for an agency where a 'theme from Theme Forest' was deemed professionally acceptable?
The fundamentals have changed for web development but nobody gets off the hamster wheel to learn the fundamentals. The web doesn't have to be an obstacle course of hacks, polyfills, libraries, frameworks and other crutches any more. It also doesn't have to be full of fancy build tools, CSS compilers and other things that make web development accessible for the first time in 20 years.
I preferred to do my own homework when I was at school, not copy what everyone else thought the answers were, changing details around.
There is an intimidating thing going on with web development and the increasing specialisation. No one can hope of being able to create a web page due to this atmosphere. But so many people - a decade or two ago - got started writing actual HTML, not assuming it is all too hard and you have to just hack someone else's work. The industry is lacking these people now and is becoming less diverse.
Frontend development isn't a creative medium if people are just using frameworks from yesteryear and taking on technical debt from themes whilst busying themselves with the latest buzzword bingo. Things like content, accessibility and document structure matter, it is no good just going for a visual design and working backwards to the inevitable 'div soup'. Something has to change.
You make a principled point that I respect. I’m generally trying to get shit done. They aren’t always at odds with each other, but often are.
Personally, I hate web design and layout, so I want to do as little of it as possible. But I know I need a good looking site to be taken seriously. Templates have helped me out and generally last long enough that I can afford to hire a “real” designer.
Also, templates are $50 for a beautiful one. There are 2-3 OOM difference in cost.
Imagine a friend with a cafe, they get the opportunity to get another cafe, same area, same clientele. With the new cafe they decide to just get some franchise, a Subway type of thing. People are familiar with it and flock there in relative droves. The original 'ma and pa' cafe is therefore deemed to be not as good as a 'template'.
The other option to the franchise could have been to have gone with the 'ma and pa' offering, same deal.
But that is not all of the choices. You could actually create something new, not hold with what you have or chuck it in and go with the 'franchise'.
With website design it is very easy for people to chuck it in and go with a Themeforest effort, Shopify, Squarespace and the like.
But a lot of 'new ingredients' have came along with CSS Grid, semantic markup and much else that the themes, 'serviced websites' and the like are not up to speed with yet and show no signs of wanting to implement.
It is also possible to build out more than just a landing page from scratch in two weeks with the new tools. This involves learning instead of botching someone else's floats, divs and margin hacks. We have Cargo Cult programming and in my opinion this story is just another example of this.
I would recommend anyone else in this position to start content first, not buying a theme and then taking the photos needed to push in the theme because the boxes are there already. This is a backwards, 'design led' process and there are plenty of good reasons to go content first, then structure it properly, spend a day or two with CSS grid, then put the existing branding on there. A static HTML page is a good start, a working prototype instead of a PDF mockup.
Then, instead of the A/B testing, ask an honest person who knows a thing or two and won't bullshit you. They will ask 'why have you done that' questions which will get the content in shape. Thereafter, once you have a go at doing it you can spot what you like elsewhere and learn from it rather than cargo-cult-copy-paste it to never be confident of anything.