Comments on: Templates – Inspiration or Shortcut?

By: Char

Char — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 16:17:43 +0000

VICS – I am having fun learning all this too. It is fun starting from scratch but sometimes I’d rather not reinvent the wheel. Your site looks great.

By: Vics

Vics — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:29:25 +0000

My website is my own (and I spent bloomin’ hours on it only to have it look like your standard outdated blah) but I have no clue on php so the blog part is a slightly tweaked version of the wp default one.

I think if I wasn’t having so much fun learning the stuff, i’d go with templates all the way – as it is, I want to be at the stage where I’m the one making templates other people want (and yes they’d be free, i’d do it for love *grin*)

By: Char

Char — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 13:53:32 +0000

Phil – that’s a great challenge! I’m not sure I am up for that quite yet.

Ingo – you are right – it ultimately depends on what the client wants.

Kian Ann – It is hard to determine where the magic line is that takes something from being a template to an original. And even when designing from scratch, there is usually some mental template that is used as a base.

By: Kian Ann

Kian Ann — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 10:16:11 +0000

Hey Char,

I wouldn’t say my template is my own… even though it is like so different from others.

I started with a template I got from the WordPress themes directory – then as I blogged, I tweaked. I took this element out from here, and placed it there. I duplicated the same code on two pages. I separated the template pages to specify different settings for categories and the single page…

But i still originated from that template.

The question is: how much do you call “original”?

Anyway, after all the tweaking, I’m more or less done with optimization – now, I just tweak the CSS for each different blog I set up. Its more efficient this way. Its like a template for a template!

By: Ingo

Ingo — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:26:09 +0000

You have to satisfy your client. That is the only point. If you can do so in using templates – great. That is efficient. I canÂ´t see any problem. It is more like outsourcing.

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:54:31 +0000

My theme is all my own! Mainly to prove to myself that I could do it. If I was making loads of designs for many different people, I would certainly appreciate the time saving qualities of a bunch of preprepared themes, but I would also work on producing my own set of base templates that I could build anything out of. The beauty of separating content and style also plays it’s part here, where, with a solid base of semantically marked up content, your style sheets can do the layout and templating work and you needn’t consider the majority of the HTML again.