Artistically speaking many people often see templates as a lessor means of developing a crisp web site. Once you develop your own content, images and apply your own graphic aspect the origin of the design idea is discarded almost entirely!
I am not suggesting downloading someone's web site and rebuilding it into your own; but rather looking around the web and deciding just what appeals and which elements work for you.
This can save a great deal of development time. There are literally hundreds of template web sites that offer these basic design concepts to work from. You can literally spend months looking at potential design after design. After many years online we have our own definite favorite web template site. Check this one out for really good starters!
Without a doubt one of the strongest contenders in the template stakes has to be 4Templates.com there is a very vibrant developer community behind this project and the designs speak for themselves. The material that may be purchased provides the Photoshop graphics files and usually some basic HTML.
Template Sites and More Template Sites!
There are literally hundreds of template sites; however nearly all are just reselling the same product as there are only a couple of major sites! The rest are downline selling the same basic product! You can shave weeks off your viewing time if you stick to the major "upstream" site above!
While there are FREE template sites most templates are pretty dull and boring. They only exist to pull traffic from the search engines - a "Lead Loss" approach! The web is like everything else in life; basically you get exactly what you pay for!
Web Template Summary
Be aware that the HTML pages provided with these templates are often tables based sites, quite often due to the technology available when they were designed. You can purchase the site individually or you can purchase it outright; whereby it can no longer be on sold as a template again.
Just remember that the template is a beginning point. Once you add your own content, colour scheme, graphic elements like photos and page header banners all that is left of the original template is the suggestion of the design.
We are not suggesting that these templates are the end of the process; quite the opposite really as they give you a nice head start from a look and feel perspective.
They certainly make excellent reference material when discussing your project with peers and the web development community. It is a nice place to start!