Pre-Made Templates; Pros & Cons?

[Binfus]

I'm pretty naive when it comes to website development but am contemplating to give it a try....the main goal being to make relatively simple 2-3 page websites of dozens of the domains I have. Wondering how easy are the pre-made templates to use by a novice like myself; what're the pros and cons?; Is there's a catch since on the surface it seems like a great deal....on ebay you can get hundreds of them for just around 10 bucks!!

 

[RJ]

Pros, affordable professional-like designs, save time/money

Cons, other sites may have the same designs

There's no real catch, except you'll still have to put in work customizing the template for your use, adding content and so on.

 

[kufel]

2c's

the pros:
its easy to get, very inexpensive

the cons: hundreds of people probably have the same template already, which can bring the value of your website down if you are developing them for sale, unique design if done by somebody with a touch of talent, can jakc up the price of developed websites or make them more attractive to visitors, and it maybe not as expensive as you think [we employ cheap east uropean designers for the purpose] and results can be stagegring.

 

[Binfus]

Re: 2c's

Thanks for the advice RJ & Kufel.

Originally posted by kufel
we employ cheap east uropean designers for the purpose] and results can be stagegring.

Could you mention where/how you employ these designers; How about elance?

 

[kufel]

$

elance is a good source, however some of them can be expensive, a lot of guys are seasoned designers, and either they charge substantial cash or simply they deliver too little for too much money.

I go mostly through personal connections, and act as an agent for a lot of them, if you have a specific project, pm or email me.

 

[identity_00]

Another bad is that the templates are not search engine optimized. They are very graphic appealing but lack in the practical aspects. In other words.. you will probably get lost in the billions of pages.

 

[armstrong]

I like site templates myself, as they do save lots of time. I purchase mine from a particularly monstrous source. Aside from the professional designs, I like that their templates rarely sell more than six copies each, which ensures that my site would be quite unique. That is, it would be very difficult to stumble on a website using the same design, given the tens of millions of websites out there.

As for optimizing such templates for search engines, it really is no different than optimizing one built from scratch. My site 1usenet.com is ranked near the top ten on several very popular keywords for my industry. As far as I know, heavy graphic content does not penalize a website in search engines.

I have to agree that some templates require at least intermediate knowledge to modify. The ones I use (with flash and css) also require tools like FlashMX, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop to use effectively.

 

[jj2ii3344]

Try
www.rentacoder.com
I have used them many times before!

 

[Artico]

As a professional designer I think the best thing about templates is how easy they are to sell. I usually sell exclusive templates for more, which brings more value to the pruchaser(s) site.

An excellent template can go for no more then $1,000.00 (1k) now a days. I try selling in the $300 - $500 range from clients.

Anyway, templates are very good to get/sell/make because all you have to do is change some text to fit your needs.