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James Shaw

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CSS Templates

I'd love to update some of my sites - they could sure use some updating.

But I'm crap at web design. The whole "pretty" thing is sadly out of my reach. I want someone to design the layout, make it beautiful, cut it up and send me css+markup that I can skin the site with.

I've actually started asking around, and found some people that can do this for various sums of money - $750 was the cheapest for a single page. $1500 was the most expensive, but also the most reassuring; he talked about XHTML compliance and testing in the latest version of all major browsers (two versions in IE).

Both probably excellent value for money, given that you get what you pay for.

BUT, having written a CMS and thought at length about making it easy to skin 90% of site designs without touching code, I have to wonder if there isn't a more simple answer (for me at least). There are a lot of sites that sell templates - or swap them for a link, sell thousands on a DVD, etc, etc. Lots of permutations - and a lot of sites doing it.

There is no "one-on-one" interaction here of course. Take the template and modify it. But that doesn't sound too hard, given that I'd be doing it not the guy running the local Laundr-o-mat.

So, I'd love to hear some real-life recommendations - especially from Designers who know what they are looking at. Developer opinions will, in this case, count for only 50% of what a Designer tells me  Big Smile

You'll notice that I'm a bit in awe of Designers since I put them in Title Case - developers don't get that, at least not in this context. No, I'm hoping to hear from people who can draw faces that look like faces, who can draw chrome and understand how to use little smudges here and there to make a design appear 3D. Designers who can make a site POP.

Hell, we have some of those people in-house...perhaps I can ping one or two during XBox time one day


Posted: Monday, June 25, 2007 9:23 PM by James

Comments

Dan Hounshell said:

James, I've had pretty good luck with CSS templates from The Open Design Community (http://www.opendesigns.org). I've found some good themes that make good blog skins. I think I have used three of them now. Blog designs seem to be the most prevalent there, though there are some site-wide type themes. They really just give you the basics, though. You'll still end up spending quite a bit of time tweaking css and basically creating new stuff that uses the "theme" of what they provided. Sometimes when looking for a specific theme (like for my wife's cupcake business) the free and open source designs are a big too generic. In those cases we've turned to places like Template Monster. Prices on those are fairly reasonable. In either case good themes will attract a log of people so, unless you pay for exclusive use, you're going to end up with the same look that a lot of people have. Having some decent CSS skills definitely pays off in those cases, you can take what you're given, change it around a bit, and it looks totally different. Neither of those approaches are turn-key really, though. Having a one-off design would be awesome if you could keep the price down. Perhaps you could try a combination of both. Find an open source theme that you like, hunt down the author and ask if they'd make some changes specifically for you for a few dollars. Maybe even expanding the theme to cover more of your site's structure.
# June 27, 2007 12:17 PM

James said:

Yeah, its' interesting. I've found a few I like, but haven't taken the plunge to buy one yet. But $50 vs $500-$2000 is a huge difference.

# June 27, 2007 12:44 PM

Alex Norcliffe said:

If you do find a design, i can thoroughly recommend www.psd2html.com to get it split up. $150-odd going up to $257 and they do amazing XHTML / CSS from a Photoshop file. I head up the sites for Conde Nast (e.g. Vogue, GQ) in the UK - gave them a trial for one of our site redesigns. Bang on time and crazy skills. Cheers, Alex
# June 28, 2007 2:46 PM

Heather said:

Go to pixelmill.com. They have some pretty good CSS templates.
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