website templates

Website Templates – Discover the Hidden Meaning of Colors



Have you ever landed on a website and felt really cozy inside? Do certain websites make you feel unusually energetic while others put you in a laid back mood? Well, it’s all in the magic of colors! Specific colors are known to kindle certain feelings and influence people in certain ways. When a content creator begins work on a project, template colors are one of the first elements they fix upon.

Meaning of Different Colors

Website colors not only attract visitors, but also create a mental image about the qualities of the brand being sold. Just as the red and green lights at a traffic signal indicate whether drivers should stop or go, different template colors can be used to suggest distinct values. Talented content developers know how to play around with colors, to generate the right emotional response from visitors to your company website.

Ten Template Colors and Their Overtones

Here are some facts about commonly used colors, and the qualities they indicate:

Red: A warm color, red is mainly used to express love and passion. It is the prominent color for special Valentine’s Day templates, and Websites about relationships and dating. Red may also be used to convey action and an enthusiastic attitude, for a company that wishes to promote a dynamic image.

Blue: Conveying cool professionalism and corporate style, blue is the color of choice for most businesses, especially those dealing in computers, Internet services, telecommunications and other modern technology.

Yellow: A warm color used to convey summer and sunshine, yellow can look really amazing on travel and leisure related websites. Yellow also suggests speed and energy, which is why you’ll find it on automobile and racing websites. It is also used for products that are yellow; like yellow pages or taxis.

Green: A cool color that showcases nature and the environment, green is mainly used for farming, nature parks and water related websites. Green also signifies freshness and cleanliness and is prominent on websites for dentists, cleaning liquid manufacturers and so on.

Purple: Signifying comfort, wealth and royalty, purple is generally used to highlight content for jewelry stores, high-end clothing lines, luxurious hotels, florists and top dining establishments.

Orange: This bright color is associated with lip smacking food. It is mainly used for restaurant and cuisine related templates, to whet appetite. Orange can also be used to suggest power and constant change, particularly for finance and investment websites.

Pink: Signifying femininity, grace and elegance, pink can be found on websites selling items targeted at female customers like beauty products, fashion accessories, clothing and weddings. It is also used to convey softness and innocence for websites selling products for babies.

Brown: Symbolizing the earth, brown is used to indicate stability and order. Companies that have been around for long and wish to showcase their reliability, usually go in for a brown template. It is also used by companies that deal with earth, like real estate, construction and mining companies.

Black: Displays sophistication, elegance and mystery. It is typically used by nightclubs, music bands and classy restaurants. Most gaming websites also have a black theme, as the color also represents fear, rebellion, subterfuge and death.

Gray: This neutral color is associated with practicality and the no-nonsense things in life. It depicts firmness, reliability and a strong belief in traditions. It is mainly used by businesses that need to display their trustworthiness like banks, realtors, insurance companies and government entities.

As colors have a powerful impact on customers, content creators will first test out various color schemes, before finalizing a template. In fact, most companies should offer you a few template mock-ups, showing different color schemes, to allow you to make a selection. Content that is aesthetically presented in the right color scheme will ensure that you deliver the right marketing message to your customers. As a result, your customers will come by your website more often, increasing your sales and profits.

Website Templates – Pros, Cons, Creating and Finding



Website templates are pre-designed web pages created for you to use as a basis for fast web development, saving you lots of time on website designing. You add your content text and pictures to the designs and you have a functional website, ready for upload. If you search the Internet for website templates, you will be amazed by how many different companies offer free templates and also sell templates.

There are many pros to using a template:
Templates save time and energy. Many suggest what content to add and where. You have the basic design for each page of your website. Because the design is the same throughout, you have the consistency that will hold your site together. Updating your website is straightforward. Templates cut out the chance of destroying layout, because they usually have un-editable and editable regions.
There are, however, just as many cons to using templates:
Many that are free on the Internet are database driven, so do not show up in search engines (for example, Tripod has many good looking templates, but all are database driven). You have little or no leeway in changing the pre-designed format. After looking at many of the templates offered, I found that very few offered a design that I would be proud to call my own. The better designs are used over and over again by many others, so your site is not unique – this will be obvious to those who surf the net often. You don’t have the advantage of working with a designer who will answer your website questions and help you with a custom-designed website.
Rather than purchasing a pre-designed template, create your own.
In most web-authoring programs (including Front Page 2003 and Dreamweaver MX, MX 2004, and now 8), you and/or your designer can tweak and re-design the layout for your final template until it is exactly the way you want it. Then, you save it as a template to be used over and over again. The added beauty of this method is that if you have a change later to that template (and change is always happening on the Internet), you can update the template and the program will update every page that uses that template if you want it to.
Where do I find templates?
If you are using a web authoring program like Dreamweaver or Front Page, you will find a variety of templates that serve as a beginning – these can be changed and tweaked easily. Contribute, Macromedia’s program that helps with website maintenance also includes many templates that may be used as new pages. If you do a search for templates, you will find more sites than you can imagine.
As with any other Internet topic, there is much more that can be written about templates. I have only scratched the surface. I do know, however, that since I started using templates that I have created, my website designing has become even more of a joy than ever before.

Website Templates – Build Your Own Website



Once only big companies could afford to have a presence on the worldwide web, but those days have changed. Today, nearly every business has a website, and usually the few that do not will want to have one. Web hosting and domain name rights have become very affordable so having a web presence is available to even the self employed for very little money.

The problem of course lies in setting up a website and making it look good and look professional. While a person can take the time to learn HTML and now XHTML to create and design their own pages, it is simpler and more accessible to more people to use website templates. Templates are much like a paint-by-number experience and take much of the work out of web page design.

With website templates it is easier and less expensive to create you own pages. Web designers can be costly and while you get a great design, your business probably can’t afford it. Once your website is designed by a service you have to pay for site maintenance costs as well as keeping the site up-to-date. Website templates usually allow you to maintain your own site in a fairly simple manner.

There are many different avenues to obtaining website templates. Some are offered as freeware and shareware online and are free for the taking. You can also purchase reasonably priced software commercially that provides templates to allow you to create almost any kind of a website.

Many webhosting companies also provide easy to use website templates to create your own pages, many if not most of them at no additional cost other than the hosting fee. Many even offer 24/7 tech support to help you through design problems if you encounter any. None of these templates require any knowledge of HTML code either.

Naturally, every site is not a commercial one. A large number of them have been created by people for blogging purposes or for communication with relatives or to demonstrate a talent of some sort or for other activities. There are computer users who do not know HTML and haven’t got the spare time to master it. For them, templates are the ideal approach. Once you locate the right templates, it’s a snap for anyone to design a site.