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Licensed Static & Flash Design Templates...
Box77 Template
Emporium - Pay per download
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Arguments For using Templates
Cost, naturally! The cost of purchasing a template and having
it coded with your own information can be significantly less than
hiring a professional designer to create an exclusive design.
This allows you to save your dollars / pounds / euros / local
currency for promotion, marketing and optimisation. If a beautiful
site has exhausted your budget, then the few people to visit will
only be those who have direct knowledge of its existence, namely
you, your friends, the designer and any existing clients that
you may have informed about it. What a site without marketing,
promotion and optimisation will never achieve is an ability to
attract new customers in any numbers. Possibly a few may stumble
across it, but not the numbers that you will need to move into
the world of e-commerce with any success.
Choice - A bad designer may be poor at interpreting your ideas.
Even worse they may have a predetermined idea of what you are
going to have and don't even listen. With a choice of templates
you get to choose the one that you think most closely resembles
the theme, colours, style and layout you would like. With thousands
to choose from, and themes aimed towards a wide spectrum of business
types, there should be at least one that takes your fancy for
your online business image. It may not be your *dream* website,
but then again, we don't all necessarirly have the budget for
our ideal site. If the site's marketing and promotion is effective
in pulling in extra customers then it shouldn't be long before
it has brought in increased revenue to justify (and pay for) that
dream design makeover.Speed of deployment. For a lone developer
looking for a graphical framework to 'prettify' the real nuts
and bolts of their site, whether it be an online store, information
site or whatever, use of a template can remove the expense of
unique designs, either in terms of time (one's own) or money (to
pay a third party).
Box77
Template Emporium - Pay by use
Boxed
Art Template Club - Unlimited access
Arguments Against using Templates
Your site will not be the only one using a particular design
as its base. With the tens of millions of sites out there, though,
the chances of a visitor having recently visited another site
using the same template and recognising the similarities between
the two are fairly minimal. Remember, aswell, that the template
is only the starting point for your website and can be heavily
modified to give it a unique feel. Add in your own pictures and
text and the similarities are reduced even further.
Often the code in templates is poor to start with. Although this
is not universally true, many templates are originally created
in Photoshop or Flash, which is great for aesthetic appeal, but
can be a problem when it comes to validation, accessibility and
the search engines. A greater part of this, though, can be overcome
if you employ an experienced coder to complete your site. From
the information that you provide, in addition to their industry
knowledge, they should be able to define your title, description
and keywords for greater effectiveness, whilst determining the
best way to structure your content. As an aside here, hiring a
designer is not necessarily any guarantee that you will receive
a site based on valid and effective code. Some of the worst, most
inaccessible designs around are churned out by so called designers
using substandard WYSIWIG software packages. WYSIWIG (what you
see is what you get) design to them, maybe, but for a lot of your
viewers fixed positioning, non valid HTML and a poor understanding
of the underlying code can mean that your site is useless or just
simply too much trouble for your visitors to navigate. At the
very least your site should be useable across different browsers
(many of us don't just use Internet Explorer), should display
completely at different screen resolutions (yes, some people do
still use a resolution of 800x600) and for the many internet users
with impaired eyesight it should be possible to increase the text
size without everything overlapping. If you are going to spend
everything on design, at least make sure it's money well spent.
If, instead, you think a template may be what you're after then
check out some of the great designs available at box77
Template Emporium
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