I recently had an idea for a side project. Not wanting to spend the 20 or so hours it would take to create a fresh website from scratch I decided to try out Template Monster. Template Monster has some pretty sweet looking templates, so I forked out the $60 for the design and was promptly provided with a download link and a password for the ZIP file. That’s where the easy part ended…
First the way this particular Template Monster web designer (I can’t speak for all of them) designed the site forced you to use Photo Shop. The entire site was sliced up using Photo Shop which means its one big image. Whats wrong with one big image for your website? Well for one its very SEO unfriendly. Google will not index an image site like it will a text site, thus you won’t rank high in Google search results.
Next the website was no where near XHTML compliant. The entire thing is done in HTML tables, that’s just what Photo Shop does when you choose to save an image for the web. Each slice becomes a table TD, TR, etc… It took a considerable amount of work to replace image content with textual content. I’m still not there and I’m going to end up spending the same amount of time fixing the template as I would have just designing the site from scratch. Even though it won’t be up to my standards, so eventually I will have to go back and redesign the entire site. Yikes!
Personally, I won’t ever buy a template again. I’m not advising you not to do so, but perhaps do a little more research than I did. I was expecting a fully XHTML compliant (or at least close enough) CSS based site. Next time I have an idea for a site and don’t have the time to design it I’ll just hire a web designer or not do the site at all. Based on this experience Template Monster seems like a place where web designers, who really do have a good eye for design, work in a web design farm and are told to pump out templates as fast as possible. I’m a firm believer in taking the time to do the job right. If I had paid $300 for the template and it met my standards I would definitely be a returning customer, but I guess they sell more templates this way. Well not to me they don’t.
Anyways thats my experience with Template Monster. Have you had a different or similar experience?