How to Use Templates to Build Your Website
A quick and easy way to get started with the design of your website is to use a template. This is basically an outline of a web page, that you can customize and add content to in order to create your site.
There are lots of sites from which you can download templates, some free and some which you have to pay for. We've listed a couple of these in the following sections.
Where to Find Free Templates
Where to Buy Templates
Both of these sites offer a wide range of templates which are suitable for all types of sites. The prices vary, but are typically around $60. Both also offer a “unique price”, where the template is removed from their site after you've purchased it, so that nobody else can buy it. This is useful if you want your site to be unique, but it does come at a cost – typically about $2400. If you really want to be sure that nobody else's site looks like yours, you'll need to make sure that you choose a template that hasn't already been purchased by somebody else (both sites show you the number of times that a template has already been downloaded).
Using Templates
When you download a template, either free or one that you've purchased, you typically get a zip file. When you open this and extract the files from it, you'll usually see that the template is made up of many different files. To customize the template and add your content to it, you have two main options:
- You can edit the HTML and CSS files using a text editor (such as Notepad). This isn't actually as complicated as it sounds, and is the most flexible option for editing a template, since you don't have tools putting constraints on what you can do. You will need to know some HTML, but this is fairly easy to learn, so it shouldn't be a big deal. There are plenty of HTML tutorials books and online tutorials available to help you get started.
- You can use a graphical WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor. These allow you to create your page graphically, by manipulating text, shapes and images on the screen until you get the desired result, and then create the HTML code for you. These editors vary widely in terms of features and cost – from the excellent but expensive Dreamweaver to the good and free NVU/Kompozer (both the NVU and Kompozer versions are downloadable from http://www.nvu.com/).
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