Template or Custom Design?

[Alston]

If the template is basically about colors and text placement, the template should have minimal impact on your web rankings.

New content is important to search engines, so if using a template will allow you to update your site more frequently, that is the way to go.

However, if the template is very rigid and only allows you to insert your name, phone number and a few other things, you will never get a good web ranking. Search engines hate duplicate content.

Keyword meta tags are ignored by the big search engines today.

Title tags and the description tags are still very important.

The heading tags e.g. <h1></h1> are important.

Content and navigation are important.

Backlinks are very important.

You may want to look into using https (secure protocol) for your site or at least for any page that gathers personal information. It's not that expensive. Some savvy people will not enter their personal information on a page that does not use https. Https may increase your rankings slightly.

My sites are hand coded in XHTML. All things being equal, they will get higher rankings than a site that is based on an HTML template. However there are a lot of other factors that affect search engine results.

 

[somarco]

Thx Alston.

 

[wilkin]

Where would you buy a template? I know I can google this and get a million hits, but where would you recommend from experience?

 

[deu12000]

A lot of people use Web Templates, Flash Templates, Website Templates Design - Template Monster . Personally I was a member of Web Templates | Flash Templates | Website Templates for Complete Websites and downloaded a life's worth of templates from there for basically the price it would cost for one on templatemonster. There are also tons of other smaller sites which might even be better because the templates are not distributed as much as those two. These are the top two for paid cost effective templates.

If you are going to heavily customize the templates there are some great free choices out there also. Here's a couple:

Open Source Web Design - Download free web design templates.
Open Web Design - Download Free Web Design Templates
Free Layouts.com | Free Web Templates, CMS Templates, MySpace Layouts
Download free CSS templates - Free CSS Templates

Most free templates aren't as fancy as the paid one's, but I like the fact that for a very low price you can have the foundation to a solid site. The reason I'm saying low price is because sometimes they want you to link back to the designer, but you can email the designer a lot of the time and for $2-10 you can take their link off of the template (each designer is different and it's negotiable).

 

[deu12000]

I posted a great reply to this post, but it was automatically deleted (I guess this forum has a auto delete feature) because it had links to several template sites (free and paid).

Anyway I guess I'll just wing this one since I don't have the 20 minutes I spent on creating the first post.

templatemonster is one of the bigger paid template sites. Personally I like boxedart because it's just one price and you can download what you want. I had a boxedart account and of course now I have ten lifetimes worth of templates, but both sites are good. These are the top two paid sites.

There are also some great free sites out there. oswd, openwebdesign, freecsstemplates, freelayouts are a few decent one's. I use the free sites for certain projects and some of the templates are just as high quality as the paid sites. The only difference is usually the designers of the free templates want a link back to their sites. I usually negotiate this with the designer and for between $2 and $20 I've negotiated with the designer to let me remove the link. I always suggest doing this because a lot of people don't see it very professional when you have a link at the bottom saying "provided for free by..." or a link to a free site.

By the way the extensions for the paid one's is .com and the free one's is .org and one is .com.