Web Site Templates

How to create web sites 10 times cheaper and 10 times faster.

Actually the design of a web site is VERY important nowadays. Online competition is very hard. The Internet is filled with competing web sites that are proposing almost the same services. For example, a few days ago I was browsing the internet attempting to choose a good merchant system provider. In my opinion, most of the web sites had some of the ugliest interfaces I have ever seen, but ALL of them had similar terms and pricing packages.

I chose the provider who had the best design because I assumed that they pay the same attention to their customers as they pay to design.

By the way, MediaMetrix monitoring shows that good design and usability influence 60% of site visitors in their final decision. Good design makes people TRUST your web site.

However it is a dilemma because hiring a good designer often costs a lot of money.

I've been working as a freelance designer for 8 years now. My first project was a web design studio (www.inverse-logic.com). After 1 year of hard work and marketing, I realized that we had more of a job than we could handle. At this time, I thought of using web design templates.

I devoted the next few hours searching for a good web site proposing pre made design, and I must tell you, I was VERY disappointed. Most of them were proposing very ugly stuff.

However I was still able to use some of the designs. Of course I was concerned that someone might notice that my sites design was similar others having the same template.  That's why I opened the template with Photoshop and made a lot of changes that made the similarities unrecognizable.

Conclusion: I saved 1-2 days and received $3000 from client who was very happy with my "work".

Two years later, I realized that website templates could become a good business and have made my first e-commerce project TemplateMonster.com.

There were very different opinions about TemplateMonster. Some people didn't like it, while others admired it. I was disappointed that only 10% - 20% of the  customers were customizing templates; others were only inserting their logos and text.

Let's get back to the merchant systems. Can you imaging how good a merchant system provider can look starting with a design like this:
http://www.templatemonster.com/~david/article/167-b.jpg

Template websites can be found in the Google directory at: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Graphics/Web/Templates

Usually, templates come in HTML and Photoshop formats. Good template sites are including all fonts and other elements needed to modify the template.

Many designers purchase pre-made clipart from such web sites as arttoday.com. So what is the difference? I think that it quite reasonable for a novice designer to purchase professional graphic elements in the Photoshop file of template...

Template design is good as long as you are customizing templates!

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