I have never used a premade website or template ever. Designing and developing them from scratch is the fun part!

Not even for client websites, I always build them from scratch and implement an easy to use content management system (developing your own PHP scripts is also very fun). Wordpress for "professionals" are very lame in my opinion.

Using those templates and large content management systems are also killing the industry. Every website looks exactly the same, and boring as hell. Web designers have incredible skill and they should have so much more work, all these template cookie cutter sites make me sick.

If you are doing Web Design for small businesses, a portfolio is the last thing you want. Showing your prospects websites from your current clients doesn't show them any actual facts, other than you know how to make a basic site.
Business owners are interested in facts, numbers, and proof. Showing them another clients website doesn't show any of those. The prospect can stare all day, but they don't know traffic numbers, where traffic is coming from, conversion rates from leads into sales.

As for Justin's comment on Content Management Systems (CMS), I believe you are wrong. Here is why. Search engines want organization. They want a structure that is maintained throughout the entirety of the site. CMS's are structured for these purposes, as well as limiting code by using CSS and PHP.

If you build a website by hand without a CMS, you are spending far to much time working on code than anything else. If you don't use CSS to keep the structure of your website organized, and use PHP to call the actions at the appropriate times, you will most likely end up with a site full of repeat code. This makes pages load slower, and shows search engines that your website is disorganized.

While some people code their sites by hand, or outsource the work to be done... I can have a small business owner set up with a website in 2 hours, and have genuine leads coming in within 24-48 hours. I don't have to outsource or deal with a single line of code.

Businesses don't want to pay for all the time it took you to plan things out, code the entire thing, load the information, build backlinks, advertise here, advertise there. They want results, and they want them yesterday. It's not just a numbers game, its about who can produce the most the fastest.

In my opinion premade is the way too go. They look good and you don't have to worry about having to sell the idea of how something from scratch is time consuming and needs to cost more.

People want something that looks nice for a reasonable price

Shawn