Using free or purchased HTML / CSS Templates for your Web Page Design

Recognizing and finding a good website template involves taking into account a few important design features. It is very important that your templates are Search Engine Optimized ( SEO ) or another words search friendly. With all the bad templates available with a quick google search, it is easy for a web publisher to pick a bad template.

Things to look for in a SEO friendly quality web template. Buttons, nav bars, and headers that allow you to use text descriptions. Search bots can not read images, only the alt tag for the image, if your page nav button is an image with the description drawn into the picture you loose keyword content.
The template page code HTML, XHTML and CSS style sheets have to be valid markup documents. You can check a page template or website for valid markup code here: HTML CSS Markup Validator

The big reasons for using templates are saving a lot of time. Templates also provide website page consistency, in a large web site this greatly simplifies updating and graphic changes.

Tips for customizing a pre-made web page template. You can easily add your own clip art, graphics and pictures in place of any graphics that came with the template. When doing so be sure you check the images sizes. If you do not match the size of a replacement image to the template image size you risk changing the page layout. And you could get a bad result when the page is viewed. If you want to change an image size you will have to locate the page elements effected by the image size and make changes if necessary. The template creator can help with this, most template providers offer customizing help. If you need help customizing any of the free templates on MyTrafficPro feel free to contact us,we will be glad to help.
MyTraffic-Pro Free web site templates

For and easy customizing procedure with good results, just follow a few simple steps. It is not difficult to customize, the best way to ensure that it goes smoothly is to make changes to a copy of the template, saving the original template in another folder. View any changes in more then one browser. There is a lot of code out there that is not seen the same way by different web browsers. When testing and viewing the page changes, view text sizes all the way from the smallest to the largest possible size in the browser.

Text size issues with web page templates. When a user is viewing a page with a large text size selected in their browser options, there can be a poor appearance result for your page. We have tested the free templates available here at Mytraffic-Pro and viewed them with all possible text size options. There is a maximum number of characters that can be used for a button or heading image so the text will not break out of the image. If you need more text to describe a link you can change the page template. This character limit can be changed in a couple of ways when customizing a template. You can change the font family for the page, some fonts take up less space. Or you can change the background image size.
Example of text breaking out of an image background:

We will be adding more free basic templates to the site soon. These templates will serve some users needs very well. However if you are designing a more complex site there are excellent website templates available at very reasonable prices.

4Templates.com high quality, ready-to-use royalty-free web site templates.
They have XHTML/CSS Templates, Table Less CSS designs, Full Flash Templates, Flash-based templates and Flash/HTML Templates. They also provide a large selection of all-purpose professional template designs and much more. Web site templates business card templates and logos start from as low as only $4.99

M. Geller
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