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Killersites.com Forum
General Web Design
Beginners to web design.
Thread: Templates-- vs Web design
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 20
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mike_kati
Advanced Member Rep of Ireland. Joined: Nov 22, 2006 Post Count: 138 Status: Offline |
Do you use a template as a web designer, it does save time, and you can add your own design on a template etc...... my question:- do web designers use or download templates online to save time, and get the job done asap thanks |
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LSW
Advanced Member USA Joined: Nov 27, 2003 Post Count: 6287 Status: Offline |
No... at least my side. Customers want and deserve original work, not a site that looks like others. That said... Stef wrote about here somewhere or in his KS Blog -Why re-invent the wheel? Templates to a slight degree and free scripts etc. are proven designs... But templates require you to trust a strangers code and I have found in all most all cases that the code in even the best looking templates to be garbage. Rarely f much use... to much crap out their calling itself "Templates." I have used "Image templates," that is to say templates that are image only and then coded it myself... I have also used just sections of templates as well. Mostly I just use templates to get ideas for designs. I am a coder, the design portion is very hard for me... just most templates are not worth the effort. ---------------------------------------- Gu.aal kwsh� yak'�i it�akw ijeet wugood�k LSW-WebDesign.com |
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EngAdven
Stranger Joined: Nov 27, 2006 Post Count: 4 Status: Offline |
Yes is the answer The number of template sites proves it. The busiest web designers I know are salesmen not graphic designers so it suits them fine. It will also become more prevalent in the futures as the industry continues to move towards instant CMS packages rather than hand made WYSIWYG editor creations. Just look at Joomla, Superblogging, or pure blogging programs if you?re not convinced about this. All give instant a high quality websites where you just apply your own or more commonly someone else?s template. The sad fact is that websites work better as information deliver systems than works of art. |
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LSW
Advanced Member USA Joined: Nov 27, 2003 Post Count: 6287 Status: Offline |
CMS's and quality code is questionable. You want good quality optimized code with accessibility you have to do it yourself. But CMSs are improving and are great tools for the customers who want to do things themselves. You build it and they add or edit content as they wish. But McDonalds hardly put Star rated restaraunts out of business... or even local Caffees for that matter. There is a time for Junk food and a time for real food. A time for reral web design and a time for quick and dirty templates. ---------------------------------------- Gu.aal kwsh� yak'�i it�akw ijeet wugood�k LSW-WebDesign.com |
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spatial_fluidity
Advanced Member UK Joined: Aug 27, 2006 Post Count: 294 Status: Offline |
I think it really depends what we are doing and also what you mean by template. iif im getting payed to do somwthing specific then i will design from scratch, it means that who ever has the task on managing the site will be able too see what they are doing, however i think it is fair to say that weve all got the standard layouts( 2 coloum, 3 colum, fluid ....) stored on our computers, so that is use of a template even if we origionally designed it ourselves. ---------------------------------------- /* noComment */ =D |
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lm
Advanced Member Joined: Oct 27, 2004 Post Count: 2550 Status: Offline |
so in the end it always comes with the size of a project and the price client wants to pay and for what he wants to pay- for look or/and functionality. ---------------------------------------- My blog |
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LSW
Advanced Member USA Joined: Nov 27, 2003 Post Count: 6287 Status: Offline |
Ohhhh yea... I have a default base structure and default CSS I use, then just go in and add the unique IDs and classes as needed for the project. That is certainly a must and yes, would be considered templates too. ---------------------------------------- Gu.aal kwsh� yak'�i it�akw ijeet wugood�k LSW-WebDesign.com |
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lm
Advanced Member Joined: Oct 27, 2004 Post Count: 2550 Status: Offline |
i've read the original question again and now it looks like indeed it was about code template and adding design to it. We all have some standard layouts ( code for them), if it is a CMS template then you need to get th one the most suitable for your graphics. ---------------------------------------- My blog |
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cboudy
Advanced Member Joined: May 26, 2006 Post Count: 1757 Status: Offline |
I'd like to chime in myself. I can understand both points of views. The NO from LSW & the Yes from SF. I am a web designer also, not a graphic artist, so I don't have all day to sit in PS and makes graphic templates to slice them up and put them into table or css design. 98% of the templates that you get for free or that you will buy are tabled based templates. This is a huge problem in itself. I don't trust strange code either, but I have gone through each page and "cleaned up" the code so it validates and follows semantic design. I do understand the point of: it depends on what you do. If someones wants it from scratch and if I have the time, I will sit down and code a CSS driven template/webpage by hand and add graphics here and there as I see fit. With that begin said, I think there needs to be templates available that used CSS layouts/validate, etc etc. You want good clean code, either: (a) do it yourself (b) get a template and make sure you can customize it so it follow design standards (c) well there is not C. |
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Robbkore
Member Joined: Sep 20, 2005 Post Count: 62 Status: Offline |
Having a default structured layout makes life easier. I designed a shell site a bit ago and just reuse the same code changing images and CSS as mentioned above. That's a huge time-saver. Going the templated path (i.e. templatemonster.com) can be good if a client wants something you cannot create due to a lack of graphical design expertise, but I've tried it and ended up spending more time working on editing the template than working on functionality and programming. If you are using a third-party script (Wordpress, Joomla, etc.) then a template may be a more ideal solution due to not wanting to spend a lot of hours digging in CSS code and changing images. As a Web Developer (not designer, though my job currently has me doing BOTH) I try to spend as little time as possible working on the pretty stuff only because I want to work on functionality and things of the like. |
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