Using templates, feel guilt?

DragonWoLf · 7 Sep 2011 at 20:30

So I've been looking at various members of OcUK websites and most look just professional and awesome be it for their business or pleasure. Now apart from uni which we made crappy sites for coursework, I've never made a good looking site, only recently I've made a simple site morahman.me

Pretty simple, I've yet to figure out what content I'm going to fill it with, just really to sell my self to be honest. So my question or issue is, I'm planning go into web design (I'm crap at programming but HTML'ing I'm fine with) so for my first website to look 'good', I went on a search for some templates I could use.

Now all the web designers out there who might have dabbled in templates, do you feel that you've somehow cheated in order to make your site nice as I feel a little guilt as I didn't come up with my own sort of design being a newbie and all

LiE · 7 Sep 2011 at 20:57

A web designer who is any good should be able to put together a good looking website, that is after all what a web designer does.

InertProtocol · 7 Sep 2011 at 21:02

HTML is fine to start with. Have a bash at some CSS coding.

I used to but busy life now leaves no room for that. Have a look at http://www.freecsstemplates.org/css-templates/ and see what more you can do with CSS.

Good luck.

Draeger · 7 Sep 2011 at 21:26

Fiddling around with templates, seeing what changes to the code and css do what etc can be a great learning tool for a novice. :cool:

InertProtocol · 7 Sep 2011 at 21:27

Agreed...larn how easy it is to mess up a CSS sheet with the slightest of changes

GravyMonster · 7 Sep 2011 at 22:22

With regard to designing a good website, always start with the content, then fit the layout around that.

DragonWoLf · 7 Sep 2011 at 23:57

I guess I'll need to put solid time to fiddle with things, @Spunkey- I've always done it the other way around but that's my uni mentality for ya, appreciate the replies peeps!

Evilreg · 8 Sep 2011 at 06:56

hi m8ty

im fairly new to this web thingy too heres what i have been working on

www.premierplantproducers.co.uk

i had little/no idea on html css before i started i still feel my site looks a little basic but its a working process.

i found that i worked to an idea i did lots of research into similar sites and selected a few ideas that i liked and tried my best to amalgamte those together
that combined with lots of help from the ocuk community has got me this far.

my best advice is dont give up fiddle and play around with things and belive me you will learn more from tackling some of the problems caused from fiddling.

oh and i guess i cheated a bit too i used dreamweaver.

evil

3dcandy · 8 Sep 2011 at 07:58

you could always look at a template you like and see how they put it together and add/delete/modify it to suit yourself...
As it looks like you're sticking with Wordpress then I'd make a child theme of twentyeleven or modify a child theme of twentyeleven and go from there...

DragonWoLf · 8 Sep 2011 at 11:02

@3dcandy - yeah sadly at the mo my website looks totally different to my blog but hopefully I'll get them looking similar

3dcandy · 8 Sep 2011 at 13:12

you could run them both from wordpress....but yeah should be easy to make them look similiar. There is a setting to make wp so it's a site with your post as the blog, it's in general I think

Scottland · 8 Sep 2011 at 15:50

Trying to design a site with no idea what is going to be on there is difficult, so you'd probably be best setting up a Wordpress site and having a play around with templates and themes until you've got more of an idea what you're going to fill it with.

Then have a bash at knocking something up in Photoshop (or similar). That way you can have 3/4 designs and either decide on the best or mix n match the things you like about each.

Some links:
http://css-tricks.com/video-screencasts/71-building-a-website-photoshop-mockup/
http://sixrevisions.com/photoshop/25-web-design-layout-tutorials/