So I make websites on the side for small time clients for some additional income. And without fail every time I sit down to work on this one site something goes wrong. First there were problems with the hosting, and now the template that the client chose is no longer for sale. I hope I'm not going to lose them over this :( I've sent them a list of alternative templates and contacted the company behind the original template to ask what is up. Real shame because they picked what I considered the favourite too and now I regret waiting to fork over the money to make the purchase.

What platform is it? Most cases such as wordpress having one or two multi use templates is the best, but surely they can't fault you for that one going off market and lucky in this bootstrap world we live in something similar is just a stone throw away.

On the other hand I always tell them not to get hung up on the looks because we can mostly just add what ever styling is needed. Shit content however does not get better with any template.

@penderis Wordpress. I tend to suggest templates that fit their niche, this is for a horse clinic so we went with a vet clinic template. I'm worried with generic templates everything will look too alike and I'd need to bill more for customisation. I'm trying to keep costs as low as possible since I'm still very much a beginner in this.

@gitblame so you know there is like xtheme and that divi crap. What i basically do is i have virtue theme it offers unlimited licenses and use the pagebuilder included but is also a free plugin i forget the name. But the theme itself has got some good widgets and unlike most it has an extensive settings page. Includes a few slider things yes also revolution slider crap and then if need some quick custom shortcodes for blocks use shortcoder.

Since the clients do not pay enough for me to even bother customizing templates although always wake a child theme using "orbis?" i do not even look at projects like custom fields etc and with the default settings of the theme and the page builder you can still achieve a good looking semi unique site and it has full support for woocommerce so that is a bonus.

@penderis That is some really good advice, thanks for sharing :)