I would like to know what people think of pre-designed templates.

I have seen a site that offers designs all in flash, and they are very nice looking templates. and are fully customizable.

This is for a hosting site; there will be a choice of flash and html at my site,

What are the pros & cons of this, and would it be a let down on my behalf if I purchased one. Even though they are very attractive and look very professional.

Some of the templates you can get look good but why not get one specially made... if you're going to buy a template anyway you might as well get your own custom made site. It probably wouldn't cost you too much more. Most designers work from templates anyway.

If you have knowledge of Flash enough to customise a template then you could design your own couldn't you?

I've never bought a template.. (but have used many as sources of inspiration) and find myself against the idea of buying one.

I have a webhosting site with a flash intro and html main pages.
I have a sniffer on my main index page that sends the non flash people (if there are still any out there) straight to the main HTML pages. I also have a 'skip intro' option on the flash part. It seems to work fine for me.

I am thinking about 'flashing up' my whole site one day soon. But when I do I will be keeping the old HTML pages online for those who don't have or don't want Flash.


What is the URL of the template site?
I would like to have a look at it.

Fully agree with Grafic on this one. The problem with templates is the decent ones will soon become uncomfortably common and this may not be the best thing if you are trying to stand out from the crowd in some way.

Get a freelance designer to create a template (or even a selection of templates) especially for you. There are plenty of them out there.

One thing though - and it's an important one! Make sure you get opinions on the design's usability before you commit and start using it. There is nothing more annoying than a site that is not intuitive to use, even if it does look stunning.

go for a custom design.......unless the pre-designed template was only going to be sold to one customer............although I would tell you more if I could see it, can you please post a link.......

good luck

There quite a few sites out there that sell flash templates ranging from £39 - $300 most are under $100. But there was few sites that I looked at which are here

http://www.a4flash.com/

http://www.multishapecdrom.com/flash/

http://www.flash2day.com/ this one has a very good site but the templates at the moment are crap.

But their site is the sort of thing I an looking for. But to get this custom designed I suspect I will be looking at a fortune.

So this is one of the reasons I was looking for a template.

The only thing putting me off is exactly what you guys said, is that the template I choose could end up plastered accross the internet on 1000's of sites,,

What I may do is buy one from a site I have in mind, customised what I can myself and if I see other sites with the same, thats the time to do something, and hopefully by then I will have enough cash to pay a designer.