New Webmasters > Finding Themes, Templates and Stock Images

Finding Themes, Templates and Stock Images

By corbyboy ⋅ July 22, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Use the tools at your disposal to their best effect

Having a good website design is essential. If a user doesn’t like your website or cannot find what they need, they will leave. It’s a simple as that. Building your own website design from scratch is not for everybody. Likewise, if you use ready made software such as a message board or CMS, you will want to modify the default theme to give your site some individuality. This article looks at some of the best places to find templates for your CMS, blog or website. It also discusses where to find stock photos and clipart.

Website Templates

There are many websites on the Internet offering website templates both for free and paid. Using a ready made template has the advantages of being quick to acquire, visually attractive and semantically accurate. Somebody else has had to worry about producing accuare HTML and CSS and testing the design on different browsers. The main disadvantage is that your website design will not be unique. To solve this problem, many template sites offer you a “unique price.” This will cost you extra but it means that you will be the last person who buys that template. After you have paid, the template is removed from the site and nobody else can purchase it. Unfortunately, you don’t know how many people have used the template before you.

The following list should get you started on finding your template but there are literally hundreds of websites offering tens of thousands of templates at various prices.

Blog Themes

When searching for themes for and ready made software, always ensure that the version you have installed if compatible witht eh theme you are using. Version upgrades will often make changes to the templates or add new features which are not included in older templates. When new versions of software are released, it usually takes a few weeks for suitable themes to become available. Always check for compatibility before you buy or download themes.

WordPress

Moveable Type

Typepad

Everything Typepad: Themes

CMS Templates

Joomla

Mambo

Drupal

PHP-Nuke

Clipart and Stock Photos

In these days of broadband connections, multimedia, graphic rich websites are now commonplace. The best place to source graphics and clipart are from specialised “stock” websites. Generally, there are three types of stock photo.

The first is royalty free. In this context, “free” means that you don’t have to pay every time you use it. You pay for the image once and you can reuse it over and over. It is important to know that these photos will be sold over and over to as many people as the artist wants to.

The second type are licenced images. You pay to use them once, but you have exclusive use for a fixed period of time.

The last type are the free images. While they are free to use, the licence terms usually require you to attribute the source of the image. As these images are free, they are likely to have been used many, many times.

Custom Built Templates

If you want an original, custom-built template for your website you can either build it yourself, or comission somebody to build it for you. While this is the most costly option it comes with the upside that you can choose your own budget and you can be very specific in what design you want. You can choose the time frame for the project and you can monitor the progress of how the template is going along.

While hiring a coder is quite a significant initial outlay, remember that it is a one off fee and you are paying for the services of a professional coder. You can supply them with a rough idea of what you need and they will work with you to produce a more specific design brief. The best websites to use to find a custom coder are ones that allow people to bid on your project. You post a brief outline and a budget and coders will bid for your project. You can check their previous work and ask them question before deciding who to assign your project to.

The best sites to check are:

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Where to Obtain the Best Web Images | New Webmasters | August 24, 2008, 7:29 am