Using Free Web Designs

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By Scot Hacker

Introduction

When building small, standalone multimedia sites (i.e. mini-sites not directly generated by your content management system, if you have one), you have several options:

  • Build your site in Flash, as covered in our Building Flash Templates tutorial
  • Build your site from scratch with HTML and CSS, integrating Flash components as necessary
  • Modify freely available HTML + CSS templates to suit your needs, integrating Flash components as necessary

The development path you choose depends on many factors, such as whether you have more Flash or HTML+CSS skills in-house, how important search-engine optimization is to your organization, and whether you can locate a freely available design to suit your needs. Unless you're a professional designer (or have access to one), it's almost always going to be easier to modify an existing, ready-made design to suit your needs than it will be to create a polished design from scratch.

Developing a functional and attractive page layout can be tricky if you're pressed for skills, time, or both. Fortunately, there are literally thousands of HTML+CSS templates available on the internet, free for the download. Most of these templates are labors of love by designers who have benefitted in their daily work from the gifts of open source and want to give something back, while other designs are sold on a commercial basis.

In this tutorial, we'll look at some of the options for working with pre-existing HTML design templates, and provide a "starter kit" of our own you can customize to suit your needs.

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Comments

1) Milan Andric, June 29, 2008 at 10:52 a.m. [Link]

Slideshows are great, but what we really need is a standards based slideshow that supports audio as well. The only things I've seen are soundslides and slideshow pro, both of which produce swf files. I've searched far and wide and have come up empty on finding standards based slideshow software that supports audio. You would think all the slideshow developers would have caught on to this by now and added some type of support for it?

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