Choosing a Template

A template is not a web site, it's a starting point. It can save you money and make the process of getting a professional website developed smoother and faster, or it can be a pain the rear. Hopefully you'll consider the information I've written here to make an informed decision.

How many main pages?

Look at the amount of pages that the template has in the main navigation area, usually across the top of the page but sometimes on the right or left side. You generally want to have the same amount of main links, but you can name them something else. When you develop the site, you can have sub pages under these main links, such as:

About - section header not a link
- Our Team
- History
- Press
- Something

As you can see you can use this for a services section if you have a page for each service, so that you don't have the main navigation cluttered with every service.

What I'm trying to communicate here is for you to think about future pages and whether or not the space allowed in the navigation is flexible enough to handle their addition without any significant changes to the layout.

Logo

What does your logo look like? Can it be reversed (white on a dark background)? Do you have a vector copy of your logo? To replace the logo in the template, and not have it look really bad or slapped on there, you need a clean version of your current logo in a footprint that matches with no background so you can put it on the color or pattern/photo in the template, if applicable. This means that you need a vector version of your logo.

Photos

For the most part, you're going to want to replace every photo on the template, especially the larger photo(s). Even if your company could use the generic image on the template, it's not recommended that you launch your site with the photos on the template. When you replace the photos, you can hire your web designer to find them for for the cost of their time and the cost of the images. Depending on your budget and content requirements, he or she will go to various royalty free stock photo places such as Getty, Corbis, Fotosearch, etc. I suggest iStockPhoto

Now, before you start looking for an image, consider the size and footprint of the image(s) in the template you are interested in. For templates using an image that is basically the width of the page but not too tall, you want the content of the photo to have the interest concentrated in a horizontal way and you want to make sure that the image size is at least 980 pixels wide at 72 dpi. For budgeting purposes, always check the cost of the correctly sized image against the cost of the credits at the different stock houses. Square images are easier to replace, just find ones that are 300-400 pixels wide.

Core Page Templates

A standard web site has the following core templates:

Home page
Sub page

For the average small business site, all pages — besides the home page — have the same general set up. However, some templates (as well as many web sites) have the same layout for the home and secondary pages. The text and photos in the body content changes per page, but the header images and the footer as well as the side images or content usually says the same, or it is dynamically updated (via a script that runs the final site) to indicate the page your on and the sub pages in that area of the web site.

If you have secondary pages of a unique nature that does not follow the format of the sub page template, you would need a new design (new html, css) for those pages. Examples of unique layouts are: photo gallery, login page, tables or calendar, storefront or whatever. If this is your situation, you'll need to have a designer set those up to match the style of the rest of the site. You could save a lot of money with a template if you have a simple site with some general information you want to communicate, but if you have a large site with a variety of unique page layouts, you may end up spending the same amount in the end. Actually, if this is your situation, it would be better to wireframe your site before you even look for templates, designers, or anything.

Text

These days it's old school (really old) to build a site using html and not have it hooked up into a database with an administration section so that the client herself/himself can update text and add a photo or even add a new sub page. This is the way you would update the text on the pages.