Working With Templates

If you don't want to design a website yourself and a designer is not in your budget, you should consider working with templates. Templates are an easy way to buy an already-existing design and apply it to your website.

Free Templates

A quick search for 'free website templates' will turn up a lot of offers. Most templates you get for free, however, are quite amateurish. There may also be some conditions of use, such as having to link back to the designer's web page, or not being able to use the design commercially, that you don't want to agree to.

If you're really determined to get a template for free, a better way is to use the ones that come with whatever software you're using. WordPress, for example, has some very clean, attractive templates.

The problem with free templates is that they will never be unique: your website will look just like hundreds of other websites that used the same free template you did.

Cheap Templates

The market-leader of sites that sell templates is templatemonster.com. These template sites pay designers to create well designed templates, and then they resell them multiple times at a relatively low price. This lets designers create without having to deal with customers, and customers buy nice templates at a much lower price than they'd otherwise be able to. It's a win-win all around.

As with the free templates, you'll still have other people with the same design as you on the web. This can be a problem if you use one of the big template sites and pick a popular template for the type of site you're running. Used carefully, though, it can be one of the best ways to get a good-looking site up without breaking your bank.

Exclusive Templates

Many template sites sell exclusive templates -- ones that are only sold once, to one website, and are then taken down. The seller will usually have many templates to select from. After selecting one, if there is something small you want changed, most sites are happy to do it for a small extra fee.

Putting Text in Templates

Once you've got a template, the only remaining step is to put your text into it. The designer might be able to help you with this, or you might prefer to add the template to whatever software you plan to use so that your content and navigation can be added automatically.