"With all respect, this is the highest evolution of academic B.S. I have come across in a while. It's abundantly clear that the author of this article is helplessly lost.Let us try to refocus on the basics: Why do we need a website in the first place? It is the cornerstone of effective online marketing and a means to an end. Unless you're running an e-commerce business, a website is a marketing tool FIRST, and sales tool SECOND. The content we put on the site allows us to build the LIKE, TRUST, and WANT, but above all it needs to support our primary goal of getting the attention of our target client first (marketing!). And to be even more clear, unless a site is "find-able," it's just an expensive digital business card. "Find-able," in turn, means that the owner of the site needs a simple and clean infrastructure for content marketing, including the ability to optimize landing pages and posts for the exact keywords [for the products and services] that her qualified avatar client is searching for in Google.And once we have a site that makes content marketing a joy for the owner of the site ... AND gets the website found by our ideal clients, we need to make sure that the visitor actually enters the site (think of a customer walking into a brick-and-mortar retail store based on an attractive store front), engages, and contacts us by phone or through the contact form.The other important goal of a great website is to get visitors to share our favorite content with the world using social share buttons and email (free marketing). Note that I write SHARE and not LIKE. I am not a fan of social LIKE buttons for most pages of the site since they tend to be a greater distraction and potential hole in the marketing funnel towards our contact page.Next, the site needs to be designed and developed with mobile FIRST in mind since an estimated 74% of our potential clients are using mobile and tablet to identify, learn about, and act on the products and services we offer. Google loves speed and efficient websites, which means we need to take a BIG FAT RED marker and eliminate distractions that affect our website performance. Just because technology affords us the ability to do something does not mean we should. Again, it starts with an understanding of our target client, for whom the site is built (not for us!).And it almost goes without saying that any design layouts need to be created with the mobile user, her experience, and march towards the contact page in mind. And that the site renders brilliantly across any browser and mobile device.Now, I share some of the [admittedly not necessarily novel] ideas the GRID aspires to (such as simplicity, aesthetics, automation, saving time, avoiding mistakes, etc.). However, an algorithm cannot make up for good ol' fashioned bottom-up individual knowledge of our target customer and her needs. That is where a GRID (even once reality meets expectations) or a template will never compete with an integrated objective-based approach to designing and developing websites.However, such an integrated objective-based approach takes a lot of time and money, and above all the user of the website still needs to UNDERSTAND her target client. You can have the greatest design and developer combo, but unless the objectives are clearly understood and articulated, the website will fall short of expectations. And spending 3-6 months designing and developing a new site means you necessarily need to take your eye off your business, and the distraction can cost you a fortune (and loss of market share).Instead, the single best solution I know of is to bring together 3 elements: a world-class designer, an efficiency grand-master developer, AND a successful functional expert in the niche industry a site is developed for. The latter will draw on extensive field experience to lay out what a target client requires and how she prefers to consume her information. That experienced-based vision will then be married with a design aimed to achieve those objectives. And finally, the developer will work the magic and bring said objective based vision to life. The benefit? Once created, the end product will bring together the benefits of a template (ease of use, quick, stress tested across browsers and mobile devices, etc.) but in a design that at its base speaks to the target client in a niche. And then the individual user can spend a few days populating said smart template with content aimed at content marketing, adjust the colors and typography, etc. Best of all, even though such a product is expensive and time-consuming to develop properly, ... once done, it will not be priced much higher than many of the widely available premium templates and wildly outperform them.And Voila, the perfect solution that trumps the GRID and conventional templates.Hope that was not too long-winded, but I just get tired by the academic consulting oriented thinking."