I'm curious if any of you had clients asking to use one of these free web templates for their website?

I've find that some are outdated and not designed to fit with newer web browsers thus would need a lot of fine tuning here and there. Therefore, it may be so much simpler and quicker to build a site from scratch?

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Brenda A. Jones
www.brevos.com

I offer template services and consultations for websites using CMS. Since Joomla just updated to 1.5 there aren't a lot of templates out there yet, but since open-source is such a huge thing right now it won't be long until the templates are out there.

Depending on what the client is looking for, it may be easier to just build from scratch, but even with limited free stuff out there for some systems such as Joomla, it's still very easy to customize the html/css side of things and get a lot of functionality out of it.

Just going to depend on what the client wants.

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Jonna
JP Virtual Solutions

Yes, it certainly depends a lot on what the clients wants. I've find that most templates they asked for had outdated flash (swf files) thus was not able to use it. I just recently got myself an Adobe Flash software so I'm hoping that it will help the situation by updating the swf files.

Some clients would ask that I eliminate several images from the template and just leave in text which can sometimes unalign some design features. Did you have that problem?

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Brenda A. Jones
www.brevos.com

I will ask clients to show me a webpage they like, which can be color, layout, content or navigation. Rarely will a site have all the features they are looking for but it helps to get us talking. Pro bono always gets the template with few changes.

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Bernice
Energy Virtual Assistant

Hi Brenda,

I don't use templates except for WordPress and Joomla. Most templates are table-based for layout, which make them way less search engine friendly, tables can break in some browsers, aren't cross-browser compatible, are too rigid for my tastes, aren't W3C valid (http://validator.w3.org/docs/why.html), and just aren't what tables were/are intended for - tabular data. Then you have special needs site visitors that tables aren't as accessible to that you need to consider. Those are just a few reasons.

For web design clients, among other questions I have, I have them find me at least three sites they like as far as layout, colors, etc. and then design from scratch using (X)HTML and CSS.

Just my 2-cents.

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Jules, SunRise Virtual Solutions - WordPress Customization & XHTML/CSS Web Sites