Site templates may be the best thing to happen to website design

Site Templates

Site templates may be the best thing to happen to website design. These works of creative art bring order and design to even the most computer illiterate website owner, allowing them to present to the world an orderly and beautiful website. Most people have some computer knowledge when they sit down at their computer to create a nice website, that is obvious. When you consider the millions, probably billions of websites on the internet, you get some feeling for the amount of creative time that has been devoted to trying to make each one unique and interesting. Site templates allow easy customization of your website.

Making your website stand out from the rest is one reason to use site templates. These are basic backgrounds and layouts starting with just one slide and extending to multiple slide website shows. They can be used page by page for a website, or connected like a real slide show with animated change sequences and music and sound effects. Some even look like movies.

The basic site template is a background with content boxes arranged in a layout. Usually there is a header and footer, with one or several content boxes or column boxes in the middle. A standard change is a quick slide to slide change with no graphic dissolves and no music or sound. From this basic building slide, you can add effects, animation, photography, and so on.

The basic content boxes may contain text, graphics, or photos, or a combination of each. Each content box can have additional boxes imported as needed for either text or images. This would be your basic slide show or website design beginning. From that point, you customize for your own product, company, or service by adding your own text, graphics or photos.

It is possible to have a content box on each slide that is linked to a master slide, so that whatever is in the box on the master slide will be repeated on each subsequent slide. This is usually seen in headers and footers, but can also be inside the heart of the slide also. Any change to the universal box will occur on every page or slide. Linked slides can be unlinked on a page, if needed, so that you can have a page with a different content.

Another fun area to work on with site templates is color. You will start with one color combination for background, texts, and highlights. You can then experiment with the look of the website by trying different pre-selected, coordinated, color combinations. Fonts within pre-designed text can also be changed, as can the type color. After you make a color combination change you can go in and make your own tweaks if you want to do that for some reason.

Site templates can be pre-designed with images or text. You can use or purchase a stock template that already has content in it, or customize by changing and adding your own information. You can purchase custom site templates for your use only, but these will be much more expensive than stock templates. The difference ranges from $10 to thousands of dollars for custom creations.

The beauty of site templates is that most of the creative work is already done for you, and done by real artists who know how to combine color, and shapes, and images with text areas and space. Many website owners who create their own slides overdo either the graphics or the text within the slide. Space can be a very important part of any design, and computer websites or slides are no exception.