Templates - Terms of Use

[Guest cwdesign]

I'm planning on starting a web-design business, part-time. Currently taking classes at a community college, as so far have learned HTML & CSS and planning on more. While I have the basic skills to make plain, simple style sites, I have not yet learned flash or Photoshop or other programming language such as PHP or Java. Until then, I'd like to use some templates to get me started obtaining a few jobs until I am skilled on my own to create more elaborate designs.

 

My questions:

 

I see many websites out there with templates and different "Terms of Use" rules that I'm not sure I'm clear on.

 

I understand "Free" being required to give credit to the designer, but what about templates that I either buy or those sites that offer a membership?

 

One site posted that the templates "could not be modified from any source as if they are your own"

 

What does this mean exactly?

 

I'd like to take templates, use the features in them that I like and also add and change things to meet my clients needs.

 

Also, would anyone reccommend any websites to buy templates that would give me these freedoms?

 

Thank you all for your help in advance!

 

Candace

[falkencreative]

I understand "Free" being required to give credit to the designer, but what about templates that I either buy or those sites that offer a membership?

It seems like that question would be best answered by the sites that are providing the templates -- most should have a terms of service somewhere online. If you buy a template, in most cases the terms of use allow you to modify it as much as you like, with the only limitation being that you can't resell the template as your own. As I said though, depends on the site.

 

One site posted that the templates "could not be modified from any source as if they are your own"

Again, you'd need to contact the website to clarify. It sounds like it is saying you can't modify the template at all, which doesn't make much sense to me.

 

I don't use templates very often, but you might want to look at http://themeforest.net/. Killersites also has a template site http://www.websitetemplates.name though I haven't used it personally.