#4: Find, Buy & Download Your Website Template

Usually if you want a professional, great looking site you have two options:

• Hire a design firm to design and program your website for lots of money.
• Spend lots of time and money to learn how to make professional websites yourself and then spend lots of time to build your own website.

But now there's a third option: Find the perfect website template that fits your site and buy it!

How much? Usually around $65 and for that price you get the design, all the code, extra icons, and all the source files just in case you need to have a web design company tweak some stuff. You can read more about the benefits of buying website templates here but let's proceed to finding and buying the right website template for you!

Finding The Right Website Template (Considerations)

Before you even go to the template website, you'll need to figure out what type of template you'll need so that you won't waste your time looking at templates that won't work for you.

• Are you going to be selling lots of products? If so, you'll need to limit your search to just ZenCart or Magento templates. ZenCart & Magento are the leading open source shopping carts. If you have enough products to warrant an actual shopping cart, you'll want to go this route. Installing a shopping cart can be pretty intense though and you may want to hire a website developer to take care of this for you--I won't be writing any tutorials on this process. But if you want to try doing it yourself, you can find plenty of information at the respective Zencart or Magento websites.
• Do you need a CMS? A CMS is a content management system. If you are going to be the one updating your website, then you won't need one because I'll be giving you step-by-step instructions on how to use an HTML editor to manage your own website. But if someone else will be updating the content, then you may want a CMS. I would recommend WordPress, Joomla, Mambo, or Drupal and you'll want to look for those type of templates. Once again though, you may have to hire a website developer for help with this since I won't be writing any tutorials on these CMS's! But you can find more information at their respective sites.
• If you answered 'no' to the previous 2 questions then you'll just need to look for CSS enabled templates. CSS stands for Cascading StyleSheets and is a way of separating the design from the content. CSS-driven sites load quicker, are more search engine friendly, and (once you learn how CSS works) is quicker/easier to update.

Finding The Right Website Template (Instructions)

1. Go to TemplateMonster.com.
2. Click on the Products dropdown button.
   
3. A bunch of options will pop up. Check on "Website Templates" checkbox and press Apply. Note: If you needed a shopping cart or CMS (as decided above), click on those respective checkboxes instead.
   
4. Click on 'Category'.
   
5. Check the 'CSS' checkbox and press 'Apply'. By selecting this option, we can make sure that the site is programmed with Web Standards, which is better for you and better for search engines! Note: If you need a shopping cart or CMS, skip this step.
   
6. Click on the Search button.
   
7. Now you'll see pages and pages of wonderful designs. Make sure that you only choose CSS templates -- stay away from the all-flash sites since you won't be able to update those (unless you know how to update Flash). Browse through the designs and find what that you like and that reinforces your message!
   
8. Once you find a website template that you like and fits your message, click on the 'View' link to see it full size and to check all the details.
   
9. If this is the right template, click on 'Buy this Template'.
   
10. You should just have one template in your shopping cart. If you have more than one, remove the templates you don't want. When you are ready to continue, click on 'Checkout'
    
11. Template Monster offers a bunch of extra services to customize your site with your content. I'll be showing you how to update the content on your site so the only one that you might want to do is the first one, where for $99 you can have Template Monster update the logo & menu items in Flash for you. If you don't go with this option, you'll have to either not use Flash (if it's part of your template) on your site or hire someone to update it for you. On this site, I'll give you instructions on doing a straight HTML/CSS/image website.
    
12. Enter all your personal information to continue.
    
13. Decide on a payment option and then click on the corresponding 'Buy Now' button. Either ChronoPay or Paypal will allow you to enter in your credit card information.
    
14. Enter your credit card information and click on Pay Now.
15. Your payment will be processed at this time and you'll be taken to a confirmation page and will receive a confirmation email. You will also be getting an email with instructions on downloading your template. This email may come up to a day later.

Downloading Your Website Template

1. You should get an email from "Template Delivery Service". This email will have a link for your download and a password for your source files (we'll get to that later). Click on the link. This will take you to a page where you can download your files. They will all be in one big zip file. Save it some place on your computer where you will be able to find it later.
   
2. Open the folder where you saved the zip file and open it with your preferred uncompression program (you probably already have one installed and can just double-click on the file but if you don't, download either winzip or winrar from download.com).
   
3. Extract all the files to another location on your computer where you will be able to find it. After everything has been extracted, you'll probably three different folders, and 2 files.
   
4. One of these files will be another zip file that contains all the source files for your template. You probably won't use these files personally but if you ever need to have a web designer help you out with this, they'll need this. I always unzip (extract) all the files from the sources zip because it's password-protected and I don't want to dig up the download email later on. So open the sources zip. You'll get a prompt to enter a password.
   
5. Enter the password from your email. (I've blurred my source password...)
   
6. Extract all the files into the same folder the zip file is in. Ok, you're done with the template for now!