A lot of custom website designers are surely vital to commercial internet site templates. I even have visible snide remarks on Forums and Blogs along the traces of ‘This website online has template written all over it.’ There are two principal motives no longer to love templates, after which some ways to mitigate those issues.
Let’s explore these.
Templates are not authentic.
There is something to be stated for creating your own, all original work. But there may be a difference between being extremely inventive and being an artist with the capability of bringing together all of the factors of an internet site headers, really appropriate use of graphics, menus, and layout right into a cohesive and eye-catching whole. Not to talk about developing an internet site with a precise wow element and hundreds rapid to boot.
I observed quickly in my website design profession that I am now not pretty creative sufficient to, in reality, create the impact that I changed into searching out. My first websites had been all made out of scratch using the hand. I spent hours deciding on the right colors, deciding on the snapshots, optimizing the portraits, and designing the menus with the proper rollover consequences. The maximum frustrating component changed into that once my masterpiece became designed, it still fell some distance short of many other websites that I often came throughout in my travels on the Internet.
Now, professionally designed website templates are, because the call implies, designed via expert graphic designers. They may not be professional website designers as such because those templates regularly have positive intrinsic flaws, but, most of the time, the look and feel created by way of the template, especially its graphical factors, paintings collectively in a manner this is tough to reap for a person without both years of practice or formal education (now not to speak of intrinsic artistic competencies and skills!)
But allow’s examine the second reason why humans do not like templates:
Templates are frequently badly designed from a website design attitude website templates may look first-class at the out of doors. However, any skilled internet site dressmaker will let you know that underneath the hood, they are afflicted by the following troubles:
1. In maximum cases, they do not employ Cascading Style Sheets to control format, fonts, or colorations. Some of them nominally employ an external CSS record, but most of the time’s style commands abound in the HTML code, regularly negating the external style sheet’s benefit.
2. Probably the most important hassle and the largest bugbear of net design purists is that the maximum of those templates is heavily tables-based. While tables undeniably make it easy to position text and images quickly, it does go towards the grain of the right web site design. Tables are purported to incorporate content material, now not website design factors.
3. The closing massive hassle is that they’re inflexible. Often a content block is a specific size, and if your content does not match into that, it’s for your trouble! Because the content and the presentation aren’t separated, it’s far straightforward to interrupt the template if you want to make substantial modifications to your website content.
So how can those persuasive negatives associated with the use of templates be overcome?
Firstly, the reality that there is probably another online website available someplace that might have the identical appearance has to be a deterrent no longer virtually. There are over eight billion pages on the Internet, in keeping with Google. Admittedly there are fewer websites than pages; however, even at sixteen pages on common in step with a website, we would have near 500 Million feasible websites. What are the possibilities? But some matters can be done to minimize the screaming template impact:
1. The inventory pix and pix used on the template can frequently get replaced with the aid of pix of the organization or person that the website is being designed for. Even simply, the usage of different stock photos or graphics could make a huge distinction.
2. Company emblems can be included in applicable locations
3. Sometimes, the complete color scheme can be modified using gear consisting of Photoshop or Fireworks.
Secondly, the bad design factors of the template can be addressed in the following way:
After all of the effort that I put into designing my websites from scratch, I soon bumped into the problem of upkeep. Successful websites want content. They want plenty of content material, and that they need content to be brought into regular circulation. The simplest device that allows you to do this is a few shapes of the Content Management System. There are numerous available commercially or below the GPL license; people have their own favorites. The point is that maximum Content Management Systems work on keeping apart the presentation’s content and therefore work on a few forms of template devices themselves.
The best answer consequently is to convert the commercial website template into the CMS template layout. After suitable adjustments to the images to personalize them, I regularly convert commercial website templates into my preferred CMS Joomla’s template format. I keep the photos but pass all of the stylings into an external style sheet; I put off the tables and employ CSS positioning. And due to the fact you’re using a CMS, you can, without problems, upload menus, new pages, and all of the different bits and portions of content material that you need without breaking the layout.
