Free Templates

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.

When it comes to themes for blogging it's very important to get the right one, simply because blogging is such a personal thing and the wrong template robs a blogger of the motivation to write.

I get a lot of people visiting my blog who are looking for wordpress themes and since I only produce html themes I thought it would be a nice service to mention another designer whose work I admire, and who does produce WP themes for free download.

Being a girl, and a big fan of shopping I particularly love the shopping manual and shopaholic themes, the cartoon characters in these templates are just perfect for any female blogger.

Not being an expert on Wordpress I think anyone who wants to know how to install a theme should check out their installation guide which seems quite detailed and includes some really informative screebshots.

I've been really pleased with the success of pixabella05 (Hawaii) and wanted to improve it with new color combinations but at the same time not take away the usefulness of the three column design.

So see what you think about the latest version which comes in two colors, green and pink. I decided to get rid of the white top and make it black, then blend this down the page becoming either green or pink at the bottom, a combination I think really works for this template.

I also changed the look of the search form in the header, the magnifying glass is unchanged, but the rest of the form looks more modern and I think gives the template a different look. In the next few days I'm going to release a version of this theme for Serendipity, but if anyone wants to make it into a Wordpress theme I'd be grateful.

You can download pixabella06 here, just right click and then 'save as'.

Pixabella04 originally started life as a concept in Inkscape and was turned into a free HTML template, then got ported to Serendipity by Yellowled, and now I'm pleased to present the first version of the Wordpress theme ported by Carl.

Pixabella04 has become one of the more popular templates over at Open Designs so I'm sure it will be well received by the Wordpress community as well, and I hope it might even be selected as one of the themes on Wordpress.com where bloggers can get a free theme, but we'll see.

The Wordpress version of Pixabella04 is fully widgetized and has an options screen to let blog owners choose if they want green, blue, and the new red colorset. I produced red because a friend wanted to use this theme on her blog but I'll write more about that when her blog is launched. Hope you enjoy the theme.

I'm very excited that Yellowled aka Matthias from Serendipity has ported my pixabella04 template to this great blog engine, the same engine that I'm using on this website so I know it works well.

Pixabella04 is a new template that I held back on releasing because I wanted to make it as good as I possibly could so it's even more gratifying to see how well the s9y version turned out. Matthias told me it was almost as if this template had been specially made ready for porting to the Serendipity blog CMS. That's a really nice complement.

The Serendipity version includes all three layout styles and also both colorsets, the green and blue, so it should appeal to more users than just a regular three column template.

You can download the pixabella04 template for Serendipity, or if you have Spartacus installed in your s9y blog I believe you will soon be able to install it automatically.

I've been working on this template for a while but just wasn't happy with the result until now. It's a green and black template, 3 columns, with four different layouts including a blog layout. Pixabella04 is released under a Creative Commons license.

All of the images are PNG's so they have a nice crisp feel to them, and because IE6 doesn't like PNG's I also included a separate stylesheet for it. View the template at OpenDesigns or download the zipfile.

After the success of my latest free HTML template, which I released as Pixabella05 on OpenDesigns, but which Carl has named Hawaii for his Blogger Templates, I've decided to update the template with a blue colorset.

I really love the blue version, even though it's the same template it somehow looks very different. The navbar, header image and search box have been changed, and I also removed the page background image and used CSS to style this instead. Download the updated Pixabella05.

I'd love to see how people use this template so please leave a comment if you like it, and thanks to everyone who supports my templates.