FAQ - Questions answered on this page...

A web design template is a set of professionally created design files for building a web site. The reason you might purchase a template is because having a custom made design could easily cost thousands, even from a fairly inexpensive designer — AND, it’s very difficult to locate and hire a really, top-notch web designer. They are few and far between.

The template files are intended to be tweaked somewhat to meet your own needs. For instance you will probably want to re-label all the categories and page names, replace the photos with images that are appropriate to your site, and re-write all the text.

Unless you know how to use Photoshop and how to build a website, you will need to have a web developer do the work for you. You choose what you need done, and we it will be done at a set cost.

Web templates are an excellent choice for anyone on a small or medium sized budget who doesn’t need to have a 100% unique design. What does that mean, a “100% unique design”? It means that when you buy a template, it’s possible that others have purchased the same design, and might continue to do so in the future. So you might not be the only one with that design. But practically speaking, the web has tens of millions of sites on it. When you purchase a web design template you normally alter it to some degree to fit your own content. Not every person who purchased the same web design template you did, will actually end up launching a website with it (sometimes plans fall through). So the chances that you will feel like you don’t have a unique design or that you will see other sites with your same design are slim.

Templates are an enormous time saver – creating the art and programming and other files takes a lot of time, so if you choose to use a web design template you’re automatically saving a few thousand dollars.

On the other hand if you have a larger budget and want to go the custom route, and if it’s critical for your business that nobody else should have your design (you’ll want to own the copyrights to the design if you get a custom design created), then a template would not be a good choice.

Generally speaking a 10 page website will cost you anywhere from $1000 to $5000 from beginning to end. That means from hiring a designer or developer, to getting the site live and completely finished.

A medium sized budget might be from $5,000 to $15,000 if you need 20 – 50 pages, or if you have special programming needs.

Using a template and a web developer with enough experience to really know what they are doing (always recommended!) will run you on average, around $2,500 for a nice professional design, around 10-15 pages and assuming you have a few bells and whistles you want added, past the standard Contact Us forms.

Templates allow web developers with minimal design experience or those in a rush to create beautiful professional-grade web sites in a fraction of the time.

When you pay for a custom design, your designer will ask you questions about what you want and eventually give you a few designs to choose from. You sort of have to choose one, or it could cost you more $$ for a new round of design comps. Eventually you settle on one design direction and the designer will tweak the deign for you until you’re happy.

When you purchase a website template you have the benefit of choosing from thousands of excellent designs right off the bat, before you pay a cent! From there, you can purchase one for around $65. To get to this stage with a custom design will cost you normally a couple thousand dollars or more. Then you need to actually program the site. With a template, a lot of the programming is already done. With a custom design, the programming will take a few weeks and cost you a few thousand dollars more.

Absolutely! This is what most people do. That way you feel like you have a truly unique design and you also saved yourself lots of time and probably thousands of dollars in design time.

If you have no knowledge of how to create a web site and/or do not intend to use Adobe Photoshop to edit/adjust your template, then you will need a developer who does. Any web developer in the world will know what to do with all the files. The Adobe Photoshop graphics program, which is the world’s leading graphic art program, is used by every web developer (or maybe 99.9%!)

A web design template is a set of professionally created design files used as a starting point for building a web site. When you order or download a template you typically get a number of source files that can be edited if you have software to edit the files.

Commonly, the source files will include a layered Photoshop master file, images, HTML, CSS and other supporting files such as Flash .SWF files or jQuery.js files if those technologies are used. Some files like Photoshop and Flash files require specific software to edit them (Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Flash for example), whereas CSS, HTML, jQuery and other text based source files only require a regular text editor.

This collection of design source files is built with the assumption that you will adjust and edit the original design somewhat to create your own web site. The kinds of things you might adjust and change are button names, categories, the logo file, the tagline under the logo if you have one, and various links on the page.

Every web site in the world needs a ‘web site host” – this is a place to post your web site files so that others may see your site on the internet. You will need a web site host.

You will also need a way to edit the Photoshop file (and Flash files if you buy a Flash Header template). Typically this means you will need the Adobe Photoshop software and if you are editing Flash, the Adobe Flash software. There are some other third party graphics programs that allow you to edit the Photoshop and Flash files also, but you will need to check and see if your program allows Photoshop or Flash editing.

You will need a certain amount of know-how to create any web site of course also.

The multi-page templates usually include a homepage, about us page, contact us page, product listing page and product detail page, and in some cases other pages like blog pages, ecommerce pages or showcase pages.

Yes absolutely you can add more pages. They are editable in any HTML program. And what most designers do is buy the homepage design, make a few changes to meet their needs in Photoshop… then export any new GIFs or JPGs as needed where they made graphical changes.