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Free Web Page Templates

Why Use Webpage Templates?

Why use a website template?Creating an effective website design can be challenging and very time consuming. You have the option of paying a web design company to create your design, but due to the high costs involved this is not a viable option for everyone, especially those just starting out on the web. By using web templates, you receive the benefits of a website made by real design professionals at a fraction of the time and cost. Web templates are a great choice for people who need to get a website up and running quickly. Web templates allow you to get right to creating your content; just fill in the blanks and go.

What Free Web Page Templates Are Available?

Webpabe templates come in many flavors, but we will focus on the two most widely used types – CSS templates and Flash templates. CSS templatesgive you a complete website style with images and text formatting. They can also include styles for CSS forms, data tables, navigation menus, headers and footers. If you need a starting point and not a complete design, framework CSS templates provide the basic page layout (3 column, 2 column, etc.) without the additional formatting, text styles or images.

Free Flash website templates are also available. These give you a website style with flash animation. This can include animated navigation menus, animated backgrounds, dynamic menus and rollover effects with sound. Some Flash templates are even partially editable without having to purchase Adobe Flash editor; a graphics program that can edit the base images will often do the job. Flash templates definitely give the feel of professionalism to your website, but be careful not to overdo it with too much animation and sound effects. The right amount will give a slick design that blends without distracting. Too much animation and too many sound effects will send visitors, or potential customers, quickly clicking away from your page in annoyance.

One of the pitfalls to Flash templates is that your visitors will need the Flash plugin in their web browsers to properly view your site. Visitors that do not have Flash, have problems with Flash (like the lack of 64-bit Windows support), or leave it disabled to speed up their web browsing, will not be able to properly view your page.

HTML templates also exist, but they have largely been replaced by CSS templates. Other template formats do exist, but they are not as popular and 99% of the time, a Flash or CSS template will have what you need.

Copyrights and Licensing: Using Your Free Web Page Templates

Copyright infringement is a big deal and with the ability to easily lift images off any website, companies and designers are vigilant (and search engines and content networks are watching as well). Any site you create should not only have original content, but an original design. Chances are you will not run across someone using the same template as you. It is always good practice to perform a search for the design you like before making your final decision, just in case someone is already using it. This is especially true if that someone is your direct competitor or in a similar topic or business. So, we should look at licensing. This may seem like tedious legal drudgery, but it is important, especially if you intend to use your site for profit.

Many of the free templates you will find are made available at no cost under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The current license version (3.0) specifies that you are free to

Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License1) Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and
2) Remix — to adapt the work.

However, the following condition applies: Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Most free templates require a link back to their source page. This often takes the form of a statement and link at the bottom of the main page (e.g. Template Design By XYZ Company). They are usually unobtrusive and since many websites are designed by web design companies, it won’t put off most customers, if they even notice it at all.

Of course the ideal is to have no outbound links that you don’t place there for a purpose, but this is a reasonable compromise. As a tip, add the green bit of code below to the link(s).

<a href="http://www.xyz-company.com" target="_blank">

This will make the user’s browser open a new window or tab to follow the link. Therefore, your page stays open and the customer doesn’t completely navigate away or accidently close the window and leave. Since the credit is still there, no license terms are violated.

Obviously, the best license is the free one, where the creator indicates that their works are free for personal or commercial use (as long as you don’t sell them as your own or use them in templates you intend to sell).

Free Webpage Templates From Your Web Hosting Provider

If you have chosen one of the hosts we review on MyMultiHost.com, you have a large number of free professional CSS and Flash webpage templates provided by your webhost. These free web design templates, unless otherwise specified, can be used for personal or professional purposes.

A tip about these free web page templates: If you like attributes of multiple templates and know CSS/HTML, feel free to combine elements. You can even use them as a free image library. If you are looking for free templates, definitely start with your webhost. If they don’t provide them, ask why and ask if they plan to add that to their feature set to stay competitive in the hosting market. If you host with a company that does not provide free templates or none of the templates meet your needs, we will be listing a number of places to get free templates at the bottom of this article.

Premium Web Templates

Professional Web TemplatesAlthough this page is about free templates, we must mention the better web templates out there that are not free. You can definitely find some great free templates, as we list at the bottom of this article, but web templates you can buy are often more versatile and higher quality. They can range in price from around $10 to $65, with an average price of around $30. This is a fantastic deal considering that designing your whole website from scratch can take days or weeks depending on your level of web design, graphics, CSS and HTML proficiency.

Purchasing a web template allows you to use the template as you see fit and to focus on content and site promotion. Also, you get a much larger selection. If your goal is to build a specific type of website for a specific audience, shouldn’t it look like something that audience would associate with your subject? If a free template does not exist that conveys the message you want your site to send, do not fall into the “good enough / close enough” trap. This can kill your business or blog before it even starts. Find a web template that fits. Given their affordability, it’s completely worth it.

Be aware of the license terms. Most premium web template providers do not allow you to resell or repackage them for sale. Also, purchasing a web template does not take it off the market; other people can still purchase it. You can get an exclusive license, which removes the template from circulation, but this is considerably more expensive. Always look around at websites in the same category / subject as yours to see if the template you like (or something similar) is already in use. If so, choose a different one. This is not only for your protection from copyright issues, but to avoid confusion between your site and your competitors. None of us want visitors to think of our site’s content but visualize and return to our competitors sites, right?

Check out the template sites below for premium professional templates. In our opinion, these are the best places to get a wide variety of high-quality, reasonably priced CSS templates, Flash templates, company logo templates and even business card and blog templates.

  • Dream Templates – Over 5500 professional CSS templates & Flash templates, flat rate, unlimited downloads.
  • BuyTemplates.net – Web templates for just about any platform you can think of.
  • TemplatesBOX – Wide selection of CSS templates, Flash templates and logos, full access at a low flat rate.
  • 4Templates – 1500+ Web templates, 300+ logo designs, professional quality and service.
  • BoxedArt – Many different types of designs, from websites to logos, all professional quality, flat rate.

Free CSS Templates: CSS Layouts

For the free web design templates, we will start with the CSS layout templates. These give you the basic framework for your site but leave the design elements up to you.

Free CSS Templates and Free Flash Website Templates

Free CSS Templates and Flash website templates are fully functional for personal or business purposes. Be sure to look at the license terms of any free template you download. They usually are accompanied by a readme.txt or license.txt in the .zip file. If not, the terms can be found on the website from which you downloaded the web templates.

If you cannot find any license terms, look for the original author’s website. If after performing a search and doing your due diligence you still cannot find any licensing information or terms of use, how to proceed becomes a judgment call and is up to you.

Here is a list of websites that have free CSS templates and Flash templates that are of very high quality. There are hundreds of free templates websites out there, below are the ones we feel eliminate the junk and provide the best free templates available.

As we find new sources of high-quality free web page templates and premium templates, we will update this listing. We hope this saves you time hunting the web for first-class web templates and on the design end as well.

Happy site building!

 

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