Best Website Design Review Blog

One thing that I have been pondering recently is whether to use web templates or (WordPress) themes more regularly in web design projects. Yes, you might view this as a cop-out or some indication of lack of creativity. On the other hand, if you want to jump-start a website design and get straight into the front-end build CSS and HTML, perhaps a theme/template is a good starting point?

Whilst I was thinking on this, imagine my surprise (perhaps surprise is too strong a word but you get the idea) when Sabrina Dent, a designer whose work I have often admired, wrote this blog post called Confessions of a Template Whore where she outlines some of the advantages of using templates. One of the main reasons cited is for clients who don’t have a large budget. Hey, I get that all the time!

In my experience, a client is rarely satisfied with a template off-the-shelf and customisation will always be required. However, when a template or theme ticks most of the boxes, customisation becomes easier than starting from scratch. In addition, you can always learn from the way that another designer does things. Just because you always float a specific element does not mean that is the only way of doing it!

Now, I’m not saying you just choose any old template here. The client’s objectives, budget, and type of business will all influence your choice of theme. You might decide to spend quite some time at the start of the website design process choosing one or more themes or templates. Although a template can be a quick start for your web design process, don’t rush the template selection process. I like to look at a variety of themes and assess which might be best.

So, what’s your take on this? Are templates bad for web design or are they a smart way of getting the basic structure and design established quickly, with client customisation to follow?

We’ve just launched a new website for the Red Lyon, a pub in Slinfold, which is a small village in West Sussex. It’s one of our local country pubs near Horsham so it was good to get involved with the redesign.

For this project, it was quite important for the website to be updated by the pub landlord so we chose to use WordPress as the content management system and a theme from ThemeForest as the basis for the design. WordPress has traditionally been used as a blog platform but after customisation it’s equally suitable for a brochure-style website with individual pages.

We also wanted to make sure that the website is effectively indexed by search engines and that a Google sitemap is automatically generated when the website is updated. There are many plug-ins for WordPress which enable you to tweak the core functions and these are the search engine-related WordPress plug-ins we used for this project:

• The Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator
• Add Meta Tags.

We also modified the page titles using a custom field and several other plug-ins were used, in part to give more flexibility with the page sidebar if we choose. WordPress is a very good website content management system but it usually requires customisation to get the best from it (in my opinion).

collect website screen shots in a Flickr set called Website Inspiration. I use the screen shots to remind myself of some fantastic website designs that I see on my travels round the web. Each design has aspects that I love, for example the colour scheme, the typography, or even one specific element that I think works really well. I have never really featured the websites or screen shots on this blog in any detail so this is the first of what I hope will be a series of regular posts that highlights some outstanding website designs. Up this week are Rainbeau Mars and Art in My Coffee

Rainbeau Mars

Website by fluidesign

What I love about this design for Rainbeau Mars is the pastel colour scheme which is driven by the purple, watercolour paint effect of the header. The watercolour splash is in contrast to rest of the page which is comprised of carefully arranged content, with some rounded corners, and a large slideshow image that dominates the page. I also like the semi-transparent captions on the smaller images.

Art in My Coffee

Website by Meagan Fisher

This is a beautiful mixture of brown, coffee-related colours, together with some subtle line shadow/depth effects. I also like the rounded corner borders, and their bottom arrow, for the images. The main content is organised into a three-column grid which really suits the website’s purpose. The logo has a cool hover effect as well. I love this design! And there are some great examples of coffee art featured!

These two are great website designs…