Choosing a great website template for your business or blog is something I often see people not doing correctly. There are so many awesome designs out there, and it can be very hard to pick the right design, far less know whether the designer has produced something worth downloading.
Will the design you love work perfectly with the site you plan to use it for? How can you tell if the designer works to the highest quality standards? Sadly, a lot of designers who give away free templates don't take the time to perfect their code or design before releasing it to the world at large.
Here are some examples of things to look out for when choosing what you hope will be a free yet still high quality template; make sure that all images look sharp around the edges, that elements you love within the template are clearly visible. It's always a sign of a poor quality design when the edges or rounded corners of a template are pixellated.
Check to make sure that all links have a uniform color, that all text looks like the same style of font has been used, that lines or borders are all the same thickness. If any of this isn't uniform, has the designer done this deliberately because it looks great, or is this an example of sloppy work.
When I go to other designer's website just looking at what they've produced, sometimes using other designs as inspiration, one of the things that annoys me the most is when columns don't line up correctly. You see it all the time, designers who don't quite know enough HTML or CSS to make their design appear uniform.
There are some really great designers who produce designs that look incredible without a single image, just text and CSS for colors and borders, and then there are designers who base their entire design around images and the text is positioned to stand out because it is framed by the background.
Regardless of which way a designer prefers to work, I think it is usually obvious if they are a great designer, and free high quality templates are a fantastic way to get started with websites so make sure you check out the variety of designs available.
These days there are so many types of website available, from blogs, to CMSs, to shopping carts that it shouldn't be hard to find exactly the right design for your site.
Tuesday, August 5. 2008
