Tutorial on Customizing Ready made Templates

Get a clear idea of how you can customize ready-made website templates to suit your area of business and your individual tastes and preferences by following the guidelines given below

Before you start, some important points to be noted : Some tips if you cannot find the template under the specific category you desire

. You don't need to necessarily search for a template under a specific category that relates to your business. You can choose any template where you like the layout and get it customized to suit your business.

. Navigation links, pictures and colors can easily be changed.

. If you have pictures relating to your web site, you can easily customize any template of your choice from any category.

. Ready-made website templates can be completely changed to give a unique special design to your website.

Now, let’s begin the tutorial

Add Your Logo

Add your logo to the site. Take a look at this example; we added the logo to SusanFrostConsulting.com which is a customization of Business template 9. As you can see, simply adding the logo and header changed the look of the template and made it unique to the client. We also added an extra menu on the left to add additional links.

Change The Pictures

Change the pictures to pictures of your organization or business. For e.g., in the above sample we have added a picture of the individual who owns the site to give a personal and unique look to the site.

Customize the Colors of the Template

Once you have added your pictures and logo, customize the colors of the template to suit the pictures. You will see that just by changing the colors of the template, it looks unique and different.

Alternatively, you can choose a color theme that you like from another template and customize your template with those colors. E.g. www.mosa-rentals.com which was a customization of Business template 1 has used the template colors of Family template 7

Customize the Navigation Links

Customize the links to the names that you would like them to be. For example even a travel template can be used for a food website just by changing the pictures and navigation.

Add Scripts or Design Elements

Add a unique homepage like how we added to www.mosa-rentals.com, where used the same layout idea to create a unique homepage.

You can also add drop-down menus, swap images, photo-galleries and much more


Source : http://www.maagraphics.com/tips-articles/tutorial-on-customizing-ready-made-website-templates.htm

Website Design resources

The folks at web design from scratch have recently posted a list of their 10 favorite web site designs. The sites make up good sources of inspiration. I particularly like the IconBuffet. For about $300 you can get a great set of icons that will make your application stand out.
Another source to consider is the icons we added to the 2007 templates.

More about how to put video on your web site

If you want to put videos on your web site, what video format is the best choice? How to convert videos to this format? And how to put videos on Web using your own site not other video hosting service site like YouTube? This small how-to-do-it-step-by-step guide is going to help you with these questions.

Read it at How to convert video to Flash video and put video on your site