"Bought" my first web template

**synthetic** · 11-12-2008

Well, as a few of you may have heard me mention before... my website was in need of a makeover and I had a design started. Trouble is... I have way too many irons in the fire right now and haven't been able to finish it up. I am trying to get a website done for a friend/client right now who is trying to get me more publicity (by adding my website info to a lot of his material) for more work but... without a website for myself to show... its just not as effective.

So... while searching Joomla templates and template building info... I stumbled upon one that I really liked that was pre-built but... it was from a site that offers it to paid members only. Never have bought templates before... I have used other templates for a starting base and created my own but always felt funny as an artist using other's designs in my promotions but... time is the key factor sometimes and I just don't have the time to learn to build a template from scratch and get it tweaked while working on other projects so... I went ahead and bought a membership to get a template and will slapping my website together finally over next month.

This is what I am going to use. While the focus of this is photography... I plan to implement my other media services too. I am also going to spend some time studying the makings of this template so later down the road I might be able to create my own templates from scratch.

Anyone else every bought web templates?

MoodsR4Cattle · 11-12-2008

I've used a lot of free templates for clients - mostly for the flash script, but I change most/all the graphics to fit the need.

I like the template you chose. There isn't a lot you'd need to do to make it your own.

**unleash** · 11-12-2008

Its a neat template that's for sure!

Is that gallery feature flash or javascript based?

Oh about the buying of templates, no I never really bought one. I used many premade parts to make things myself (just like a composition) But I always changed the biggest part of the template so that it was my own.

**synthetic** · 11-12-2008

thanks for the vote of confidence on the template choice guys

yeah... I used to use free templates and just modify them enough to make them my own but always wanted to make my own from scratch... I actually like designing them and if I could get good at the development of the template from scratch... that would be sweet but there are many cool new coding things like AJAX, Mootools, etc. that I am not real familiar with so getting something with it already implemented and working and is nice. I also figured I could use it for a learning sample too.

Unleash... I think this is using variations of javascript like Mootools but different. I haven't looked at the code yet so can't say for sure. They call it S5 Effects. They claim it doesn't cause conflicts like Mootools with various components.

**unleash** · 11-12-2008

Sounds cool!

I was like doubting if it was ajax or javascript.....but yeah javascript seams like the better choice. Anyway, when it is done, will you show us?

U'ziel · 11-12-2008

I cant see any AJAX on there. If you know a server language like php and javascript AJAX really isn't that hard to pick up. I wouldn't go OTT on it though just some nice features like populating your menu on the fly from a db or flat file or perhaps a poll something like that. If you over do it and rely on an AJAX querie to return images for example google and other search engines will not be able to see the pages with said images on them and you will get less hits.

Love the template though! it shows what you can you do with time and good knolwedge!