When your web development project asks for a custom, well-designed admin panel or dashboard interface, you might be still on the fence about the tech you are going to use. Should you develop it from scratch, or stick with the chosen CMS, or go for a template? Well, of course, you should go for a template! Because it’s almost always the fastest and the most cost-effective solution when you aim for extensive customization and integration of your admin panel. But don’t just take our biased word for it, read on to see for yourself.

What is an Admin Template and Why Would You Need One?

Admin templates have emerged as a way to make it easier for developers to build the UI of an application’s back-end. Imagine a set of ready-to-use pages and elements (like widgets, charts, ​and icons) that you can push to prod in almost no time instead of getting bogged down in development from scratch. That’s what templates are. Time-saving at its finest.

With the time saved come reduced costs. Here’s the math. Building an admin dashboard from the ground up will take you roughly 500-1,000 person-hours — or $25,000-50,000, based on the average developer salary in the US. Or, you can buy a licensed template for as little as $1,000. How cool is that?

But there is more to templates than saving time and costs. However counterintuitive it may sound, when it comes to admin panels, templates (think premium ones) don’t get the one-size-fits-all stigma that is usually stamped on off-the-shelf products. So if you ask why not simply use a CMS, here’s the answer. While platforms like Shopify or WordPress came in to solve narrow tasks such as e-commerce and content management, admin templates are here to address broader and more specific business needs through deep customization and integration.

Say, you are building an admin panel to visualize and manage data collected from a network of machines in a one-of-a-kind smart factory setting. And you want it tailored to users’ unique expectations for the design and functionality. Unless your developers’ needs are covered by one of the ready-made solutions available on the market, going for a customized template will probably be the optimal option. Consider it a good rule of thumb for any development project you are working on that requires a back-end UI.

Admin Template Customization and Integration: How Far Can You Go?

The short answer is you can customize your template as heavily as you need unless it stops being cost-effective for your project. The long answer is let’s take a look at some examples based on the real-world application of our admin templates here at Flatlogic.

AI-powered Drone Data Management Solution

With our customized Sing App template at its core, this tool enables solar panel operators to automatically collect and analyze drone photos. It relies on a trained neural network to recognize equipment defects and report them to the personnel through a neatly organized, real-time dashboard.

Here you can find the case study.

Booking Management System

Rezbot is a booking management system built on top of our Sing App admin template, helping activity centers and their event-organizing clients to automate sales. From a single intuitive interface, they can manage events, availability, bookings, payments and customer feedback, while maximizing all the data they collect.

Here you can find the case study.

The point is, you can integrate an admin template with pretty much any industrial solution: HRM, CRM, ERP — you name it. You can as well go down to the department level and tailor the admin experience to the needs of a very specific role, like surgeons or nurses, be it in a healthcare setting, for example.

Bear in mind, however, that customization and integration can be daunting because you’ll have to get your head around a stranger’s code. So you might want to choose a template vendor that will do that for you (not all of them can). Creators usually know all the capabilities and limitations of their products and are able to accomplish this task faster than anyone else, and with less risk that something goes wrong technically. Moreover, these guys can provide valuable pre-sales consulting as well as post-launch maintenance, including regular updates and new feature rollouts.

Key takeaways

Now let’s go over that what-are-admin-templates-all-about thing:

• Admin templates are huge time-savers, sparing developers the need to write tons of code from scratch.
• Premium templates are highly customizable, unlike most ready-made e-commerce and content management systems, designed to address very limited needs.
• You can integrate a template with virtually any other system in place, which makes it a go-to solution for companies with specific industry requirements.
• It’s worth calling on a vendor that will help you to choose a template that speaks to your needs and propel its integration with your ecosystem.

Originally published at https://flatlogic.com/blog/benefits-of-admin-templates-explained/