Website templates make designing your website easy

You can create your own if you are creative and have some computer knowledge. Or, you can obtain website templates as part of a website purchase from a hosting company. They usually offer a variety of design templates that are color coordinated and ready to fill in by the website owner. A third option for website templates is to purchase a high quality design template. These can cost upwards of $10,000 to purchase, depending on creativity and customization. Another way to get a template is to hire a designer, or design studio to produce one.

Pre-designed templates are easy to use, and get your website going quickly.

There are thousands of templates to choose from, and many design firms that will produce them for you. Individual, custom designed templates take longer to produce and cost considerably more.

Templates are fun to use, and you do not need a ton of computer knowledge to use them to create an attractive, professional looking website. That is the major advantage and why most people find some kind of template upon which to build their website. There is a lot of flexibility with templates. Even after you have your website "finished", you can change backgrounds and layouts to give it a fresh look, or just to make a change. Colors and text can be adjusted and tweaked. You can do all this yourself and not worry about which colors go with other colors for a good looking end product.

Text and other content is inserted into the webpage with special content and image boxes, including slide shows and videos. You can easily duplicate information, and move it around, box up or down, until you are satisfied with the look. Certain boxes can be master type boxes, that repeat exactly on each page. There usually is a bottom box with copyright information, and a header box for logo and page titles. On each page there will be a navigation box so viewers can access each page easily. This navigation box appears on every page.

Layouts for each page can be the same or different with many website templates. The plainest is a "white page" that can be used for large text areas or photos. Other layouts may include all columns, all boxes, or a mix. The choice used depends on the material you want to include. For example, a single column next to some boxes that are about two thirds of the page are nice for running text down the side in the column, and then placing images or advertisements in the boxes.

Most design templates have an image across the top header and a place for either a logo or a headline.

Inside the template, you can insert your meta tags, button names, keywords and page descriptions. You can rename the pages as you wish and rearrange pages by priority and appearance in the website. Buttons can also be renamed and linked as you want. If you insert advertiser banners or text, they can be linked to open in a new window so that when done, the viewer returns to your original page the ad was on. These are used frequently by affiliate marketers.

Payment for your website template:

... is included with your hosting package, and can usually be done on a monthly to yearly basis, or by multiple years for the greatest discounts. This depends on your website hosting service. If you purchase a template outright, either as a shared website design or custom design, you pay once and are done. Your purchase is good only on one project, you cannot use that template for multiple websites per agreement with your designer company. If you design your own, of course, you are free to do whatever you want with it.