Free website templates
When you are starting to develop a website, you start with a blank sheet, a good idea for a website perhaps, and then…you need a design for your website.
We have all seen as we surf the internet that some designs are catchy and attractive and others are less so. An attractive looking website can go a long way to keeping sutomers and site visitors interested. So how do you get a good-looking site, and more importantly how do you get it without spending a lot of money.
Often software such as FrontPage comes with free ‘themes’ and templates. These are fine if you really want to use them, but in my experience are quite troublesome to maintain, sometimes require ‘frontpage extensions’ enabled on your server (often an additional cost) and tend to generate webpages with excessive amounts of code. Websites generated with these also tend to ‘look the same’ despite having different colours and styles.
Much preferable: the generosity of the internet community means that there are hundreds of website templates available for you to choose from online, completely free. and many more if you are willing to pay, typically $60-100.
Free download templates are generally easy to use once you have downloaded them into your web software programme - FrontPage, Dreamweaver etc.
Free website templates are often HTML rather than PHP based - don’t worry about that if you are building a small, stand alone website with less than about 50 pages. This means that you will not have database functionality, and will not have the extra flexibility that PHP can provide. But many sites don’t want or need that functionality anyway.
Our favourite resource for free website templates is at Open Source Web Design . They have a great collection to choose from, and remember that it is easy to change the picture at the top if you don’t like it - simply find the picture, usually in the ‘images’ folder, check what size it is in your usual photo software, and save a new picture with the same size and filename, overwriting the original, and upload it to your website host.
One other comment about free templates - they will almost always have a link to the designer at the bottom of each page. Do not remove that link! It is the designers reward for producing the template in the first place.
There are lots of other ways of creating a website that don’t even involve this small amount of effort - wordpress, google pages, and numerous others enable you to do it almost completely on line (this site is built with wordpress) which we will come to in due course. Wordpress particularly is extremely quick to install and get up and running with.
If you are feeling adventurous you can also check out joomla and drupal - free / open source software more suited to larger websites, and with a steeper learning curve, they also offer a great deal of flexibility. Again, we will visit these later.