Custom Web Site Design Or Website Templates - The Big Debate

Speaking for myself, who cares! So long as no one is being ripped off or hurt, I fail to see how this is as big a deal as some folks have made it out to be.

A lot of custom web site designers are really critical of commercial website templates. I have seen snide comments on Forums and Blogs along the lines of ‘This site has template written all over it’.

There are two main reasons not to like templates, and then some ways to mitigate these problems.

Lets explore these.

Templates are not original

There is something to be said for creating your own, all original work. But there is a difference between being somewhat artistic and being an artist with the capability of bringing together all the elements of a website headers, judicious use of graphics, menus and layout into a cohesive and pleasing whole. Not to talk about creating a website with a definite wow factor and one that loads fast to boot.

I discovered soon in my website design career that I am just not quite artistic enough to really create the effect that I was looking for. My first websites were all created from scratch by hand and I spent hours and hours on choosing the right colours, selecting the graphics, optimizing the graphics and designing the menus with the right rollover effects.

The most frustrating thing was that after my masterpiece was designed, it still fell far short of some of the other websites that I regularly came across in my travels on the Internet…. Source: web pro news

[tags]template,graphics,website design,menus[/tags]