Hello peeps, I have a question for you, if i wanted to make a simple professional web page which is accessible to every one. Will this web page template be an example?? if no…why???
Cozy house website template
Who knows.
Is it appropriate for the content of the website, the clientele, etc?
Templates don’t automatically make professional web pages.
Sorry for the imprecision. i was talking about the layout. it’s responsiveness, it’s accessibility.
Is it responsive?
Are links well displayed for the user to use them easily?
Are the text readable? etc
I’m not sure what you mean when you say “accessible to everyone.” Are you referring to ADA compliance? Or are you just asking whether or not people will find it engaging, easy to use and work well across all browsers?
Beyond that, I agree with PrintDriver. It’s the content you put into a website that will make it useful or not. If the template has the general features you need and the personality you want, it’s up to you at that point to populate it with information relevant to your target audience.
Oh i think u gave him now a new perspective of web design. Thank you so much. Asking if the website was professional or accessible was not appropriate. I now figure out that I just wanted to know if the website was visually appealing.
I think it is a nice-looking template, but it really does depend on what you do with it.
Personally,I despise templates in the same way I despise clip art. It is much better to design something appropriate for your client’s individual needs. The cookie-cutter approach is not design and, for me, feels like selling snake oil and mildly ripping off clients or at very least not giving them an honest solution to their problem for they money.
If your client’s business or service is unique, how can a website that any number of other businesses could have, be telling their individual story.
That template is fairly attractive, but without knowing what your client does, it is impossible to say whether it is good or not – and for reason stated above, I’d say, it’s not.
Would you ever write a book by taking, say David Copperfield, and just changing the characters’ name’s? That’s plagiarism not literature. Even if design by template is legal, it does not make it ethical.
I know millions of people do it, but it is just a pet hate of mine.
If the client can afford it or wants to pay that much, yes, a lot of the time. A custom CMS template is much more time-consuming and expensive to build, whereas an off-the-shelf template can be implemented and tweaked for a fraction of the cost.
There are also a good many off-the-shelf templates for a variety of CMSs that can be extensively customized through module positioning and add-ons to the point of it having little to no resemblance to the base template from which it was constructed. Some templates have few options and are made to be used as they appear. Others are built for extensive customization and add-on options without the need to reinvent what capabilities already exists within the template or underlying framework.
I agree that there are a good many specialized purposes for which an off-the-shelf solution is not appropriate and for which custom code (both back- and front-end) must be written. For most small- to mid-sized websites, though, a unique design doesn’t require starting from scratch in order to meet the client’s individual needs.
I get it and I agree with most of what you say. Of course there are times when it is necessary for a whole host of reasons, but intuitively, it just feels all wrong. I have fought it with myself for years on this one. Is it a shoddy shortcut, or is it smart workflow? In everything there are constraints, in a similar way that you are always going to have to be constrained by the limitations of cmyk, unless you have the budget for a load of spot colours. No different to being constrained to A4 paper for a letterhead, etc.
My hatred of template design is just a prima donna, purist thing, in this case fuelled by 3am insomnia. I knew I’d get a backlash – and deservedly. Just a bit of a very (unhelpful to anyone) rant really.
That said, it still feels like I’m cheating if I ever do it.
I understand your view. I’ve felt much the same way at times.
I’ve never just picked up a template and resold it to a client. That, I think would be wrong unless the client was paying me only to find the template and install it.
I have, however, used templates as the basis for completely customized designs where the underlying capabilities of the template made possible a much lower cost for the client while still providing the client with a completely unique, one-of-a-kind design.
Taking the idea to an extreme, if one wanted to be totally original, we would also code our own CMS to match the precise needs of each client. Mostly clients, though, don’t want to pay several hundred thousand dollars for a buggy content management system when WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and others can be obtained for free and work better.