Why Use a Web Design Template?
Many smart and savvy businesses are choosing to use a web site template, and avoiding employing a professional designer. Why? Well, there are clear benefits: saving on cost, saving on time, and ensuring quality.
Web templates close the gap between the amateur web site owner learning to create his/her own web site, and a one-off custom design. Sky Internet Services is part of a world wide network providing you with cutting edge templates. We have templates in the following categories
What is a web site template? A web template is a ready-made design for your web site, including images, some navigation, preferably several sample pages and in some cases Flash animation. However, it has no content related to you or your business – that must come from you! Remember that a web template must be customized / modified (to whatever degree you are comfortable with) to turn it into your very own web site
What about hiring a web site designer,
or using one of these easy web site builders tool to build your own web site? The answer to this question is simple and straight forward – your, and your business’, professional image. There is no other way to say this - if you do not have appropriate web / Internet design experience, don’t put together a quick web site and expect it to be a professional portrayal of you / your business! At the end of the day as with (almost) everything in life you get what you pay for
So then do you have to spend a lot of money having a web site custom designed for you? Well, you could. But you no longer need to!
A low-cost, but professional design
While selecting a ready-made web design template, you will probably browse through a collection of different web site designs until you find one (or a few) that you like.
Expect to be able to at least see a screen capture of what your web page will look like, and hopefully a “see-in-action”– which lets you see exactly what you will be getting.
Choose your template carefully, and you will have a professional design, executed by a qualified designer with all due attention to accessibility, standards compliance, browser quirks and a lot of other things that you would not want to have to learn about from scratch, yourself! All for a fraction of the cost of hiring a custom web site designer or design firm.
Avoid the common mistakes made when choosing a web site template
Don’t assume that every last thing within the template can be changed, easily. Of course anything can be changed if you have graphics knowledge, but for the novice, if you’re unsure whether a particular graphic used can be easily replaced by your own image, ask the template designer! This is why it is best to choose a template store where the template designer provides personal support for his / her designs.
Sometimes one or more elements of the template design are intrinsic parts of the template, and cannot just be “swapped out” without technical knowledge. Good, professional template designers will offer a customization service to perform this kind of function for you.
What a template is – and isn’t
The web site template you have chosen is a look-and-feel for your site. Some high-end templates have database back-ends and so on built in, but straightforward web site templates are generally a “shell” for your web site Adding the content which is specific to your web site, and “making it your own”, involves editing the template. Fortunately, these days html / web editors are very easy to use, but be aware that you will need to do add content to the template to make into your web site
You will want to add your own text, set your meta tags (keywords and description), and possibly insert some product images into your product listing pages (if applicable).
Not the only one!
Most web site templates are sold more than once – which technically means that you won’t have the only web site on the Internet that looks like yours. However, don’t consider this to be a big problem – with Google having over 8 billion sites (May 2005) in its index, the chances of someone seeing another site that looks like yours are tiny. However, if you really need a copyrighted design, ask us about buying the template for exclusive use. This will increase the price though
Web site templates are a cost-effective way to produce an attractive, professional web site at a fraction of the cost of hiring your own web designer.
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