Template or Not ?

[britishbulldog]

Hi,

Im looking at starting a niche community site and was thinking of having it built form scratch but i see a lot of real nice templates out there,should i have one built from scratch or use a template and what is the real difference between the two ?

Thanks in Advance !

Wes

 

[Kevin]

Hey bulldog,

Both ways can work, but, clearly, the template option is faster and less expensive. And if you do not have much design and coding experience, it could be the way to go.

See what type of templates that you can find; and if you find one that strikes you, you can consider trying it. If it doesn’t work out, then you can go to option #2.

(Remember that you can always change course if the first option does not work out as anticipated!)

And keep your focus on what matters most – CONTENT !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Best of luck to you.

 

[britishbulldog]

Thanks Kevin !

 

[droplister]

I almost always go with templates, but make it my own. Use the template as a base. Down the road someone could get all pissy about it being the same design as site xyz. And just because a template looks good doesnt mean its good for your site. So often I bump into sites using web host templates, but they arent selling hosting. DOH

 

[Gerry]

Are you going to do some of your own programming or some of your own programming?

Is it going to be a Microsoft FrontPage type thing?

When you look at the templates, even the free ones, see what software or programs are required or recommended for editing. Many that include flash intros will require you to have some rather expensive software to do the editing.

You may also want to consider using a dynamic format such as Joomla which I recently used for the first time. Intimidating at first, but very satisfied with the end result. I learned it and had the site up and running in less than three weeks. And we are not talking about a simple one page site. Joomla templates are feature rich and very appealing. Most are free and the ones that do charge ultimately make them free as new ones come out. The cost will be a little time in learning how to use them but there are many tutorials available and some fine help and advice right here on this forum. Dynamic web pages with options like RSS feeds, video, sound, flash...way too much to learn at first so that will come later down the road.

Other suggestions are also a WordPress template or another new one to me, Dropal.

You may also want to try some of the free wiki sites such as Wikidot.com. They do have a limited number of templates but will also host your site for free. You can even redirect you DNS server to point to your personal site so it come up as yoursite.com instead of yoursite.wikidot.com.

Currently they allow you to host three sites with them but I think they may be changing to no limit. Also just revamped their business restrictions by lifting them. Initially they were no allowing revenue generating sites but changed their mind. A fellow named Michal from Poland put together this project and is very helpful and has answered all my questions and emails when he had the time to do so.

I am simply letting you know what options are available. If you use Microsoft Frontpage or Publisher, you will find yourself a slave to your computer that the software is on. That is how I started out. Any updating immediately took the site down and page rankings dropped.

With these other options, all being open source, any computer any where in the world is at your service to update and make changes simply by logging onto the administrator panel and making instant revisions, additions, and deletions without ever compromising ranking or site worthiness. I am sold on this format after years of being a pawn of Microsoft's products.

Free is good! And there are a ton of free options out there. It may simply take a little bit of time to learn new skills but you may find yourself learning a skill that sparks you to do more with your domains.