September 20, 2022

Flex Templates! What Are They And Why Are They Awesome?

Matt

Flex Templates! What Are They And Why Are They Awesome?

What Are Flex Templates?

Flexible templates (or Flex Templates if you’re a cool kid) are exactly what they sound like. These templates are designed and developed from the ground up to allow the creator of a page to use this flex template on a variety of pages.

How Are Flex Templates Different From Normal Templates?

Most normal templates are perfectly designed and developed for specific pages. These templates are great for pages that share a lot of the same type of content and order of information, they all can just reuse the same templates. They have content blocks which are mostly optional, however these content blocks are always in the same place and are always the same on each page using this template.

Flex templates are designed and developed with an array of content modules that can be added, customized, and rearranged on a page. These modules can range from being content blocks for testimonials, image gallery, general content, or whatever a website might need. These are essentially the building blocks for what type of content will appear on a page, allowing them to be used on many pages with varying types of content and order of information.

The Content Modules Found on Flex Templates Are:

Completely Optional. You can have all sections added to a page or just a few or just one. The choice is yours.
Capable of Any Order. You can rearrange these modules with ease so you can choose what information comes first and what follows it.
Unique and Customly Created. The modules are specifically created for each site.

What Content Modules Comes With a Flex Template?

This depends and varies on the client and can range widley. Some clients need just common modules such as:

General content sections
Content sections with images
Testimonials
Video/Image Slider or gallery
Call to actions
Icons with Callouts

There are many clients that need more complex or unique modules such as charts or comparison of products as examples. Before creating a flex template, we always sit down with the client to discuss which modules will be the most useful for them and what unique modules we can create for them. Since the flex template is created with modules, it is always easy for us to add more modules even after the client has launched their site.

Example 1

Fortifi Bank

Both of the pages below use the custom made flex template. You can see that even though they use the same template, they are able to use a variety of content modules to make these pages feel unique as well as being selective with what modules they want on the page. We were able to have an early on conversation with Fortifi about how they might use a flex template and created a variety of complex custom modules so they could better use the template for many pages on their site.

Example 2

Filament

Filament makes great use of their Flex Template by using across most of their main pages including their Careers page and their Approach page. Below you can see some repeated content modules, but due to the different order and types of the content modules, the pages each have a distinct feeling and look.