I use trusted website templates (themes) that developers have created and perfected over the course of many years. Then I customize it to be completely unique for each of my clients. So yes, it is a unique design when complete, but the foundation of it is a well thought out theme created by professional theme developers. Using Shopify or WordPress requires certain layouts and CSS coding tricks that I’m not too crazy about, so I allow the templates to do the foundation work (coding) for me while I do the design and layout part of the project, using beautiful pictures, colors and custom advertisements… The part I love most.
I used to create 100% custom designs using HTML and light CSS, but I found that using pre-made themes especially in WordPress allowed my customers a lot more freedom to edit and add to their own website, which is a feature most of my clients really appreciate.