CMS Templates

Template or Design?

I think for beginners it’s a good system to come up with your own design idea that you develop yourself, then find a template that meets your layout demands and form your design to work into the dimensions of the template. The template has it’s advantages and saves time, but having the knowledge to be able to design a template from scratch within a CMS would be ideal. With that kind of know-how, you could just edit the workings of the template instead of having to work around them.

FreeCMSTemplates.com

www.freecmstemplates.com

I thought freecmstemplates.com was an awesome resource for downloading free CMS templates. No thought required here, the first thing you see is the three big CMS applications: WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal.

The themes are broken into “series,” that are broken down further into different variations and color modes of that theme.

CMSTheme.net

www.cmstheme.net

This site had a ton of free themes as well as commercial themes to choose from. I liked the variety of themes I found here. They offered themes in Blogger, Drupal, Joomla!, Magento, Moveable Type, Textpattern, WordPress, e107, and phpBB.

CMSTutorials.org

www.cmstutorials.org

This site had Lots of great tutorials for CMS Systems, but most of them were for WordPress. You could sort the tutorials by system and there were also other tutorials for things like PHP, CSS, HTML, and Javascript

HV-Designs.co.uk

www.hv-designs.co.uk

I really liked this tutorial website. There were Photoshop tutorials, coding tutorials, WordPress tutorials, jQuery tutorials, freebies, videos and articles. I really liked the design of the site itself too, it was very well put together.

Modified Template

This is an image of the template we used for the ArtSpace site:

http://www.themes2wp.com/?s=zdesign&x=0&y=0

This was the only image I could find of this template, the demo seems to have been removed from the server. We chose this template because the layout suited our needs in color scheme, features, and layout. After some modifications, the template now looks like this:

websmx.com/dme/artspace/wordpress

We haven’t settled on a background yet and the slide show doesn’t work yet, but the drop down menus are working.

That’s about it for CMS templates. Thanks for reading!