Choosing a Template

Find a template that corresponds to your product or service.

Let’s assume you operate a pizza parlor.

You can start by entering the word "pizza" in the keyword field of the the search form above and pressing the "Search!" button. Voila!, two pages of templates with pizza themes or pizza references.

But then you say “Ah, but those templates are too narrowly focused—I serve other items besides pizza. I want a more general theme for my website.” Okay, look through the template categories listed in the left-side menu to see if more general categories applicable to your product or service are listed. You’ll find general categories such as “Cafe and Restaurant” or “Food & Drink” that might contain useful templates. You can also enter a more general term in the keyword field of the search form.

Find a template that corresponds to your clientele.

“I can’t find a template for for my particular product or service.”

Okay, what kind of clientele do you serve? Urban professionals? Look through the “Business” category. Farmers? Look through the “Agriculture” category. Find a template with a theme that corresponds to your clientele, and provide us with pictures of your product or service; we will incorporate your images into your chosen template.

Find a template that corresponds to your location.

Where is your business located? In the middle of the big city with skyscrapers all around? Look through the “Architecture” category. In an oceanfront resort? Look through the “Travel” category. Find a template with a theme that corresponds to your location, and provide us with pictures of your product or service; we will incorporate your images into your chosen template.

Full-Flash versus HTML

Full-Flash Templates

Full-flash templates are preferred if you want spectacular page transitions among a low to moderate number of pages. To update a full-flash site yourself—as opposed to having ThatsASite.com or someone else update it—you will need Adobe Flash authoring software.

Full-flash templates are categorized as follows: Flash site, Flash site 8 (newest version), Dynamic Flash site (some content can be edited with a text editor).

We also have Flash Intro Templates, which are short introductory animations which can be integrated into an HTML site like a splash page. They can be set up to run only once per user.

Flash templates also have HTML versions included; these lack the nifty page transitions but often have animated headers and/or menus similar to the Flash versions.

Full-flash sites are generally not considered to be as search-engine-friendly as HTML sites. The typical full-flash site is entered only via its home page—no external links to other pages. To the extent that you will rely on search engine rankings to drive traffic to your website, you should avoid full-flash sites. On the other hand, if you expect that most of your website traffic will originate from other media that display your web address (e.g., your Yellow Pages listings, newpaper ads, tv/radio commercials), a spectacular full-flash site may be the better alternative.

Typically, the entire full-flash site is downloaded before the viewer sees the home page, so the wait time to see the home page is usually longer for a full-flash site than for an HTML site.

HTML Templates

HTML templates are preferred if you want easier maintenance, or if you expect to have many pages or pages with dynamic (database-driven) content—such as a shopping cart. HTML sites can be updated with a simple text editor (if you understand HTML coding) and ftp client, or with more advanced design tools that provide a graphical interface and require no coding skills.

HTML templates are also more friendly to search engines. Search engines can easily index the content of each page of your HTML site and can link to each individual page.

Most HTML templates contain a limited amount of Flash animation such as animated headers and/or menus, but lack the spectacular page transitions typical of full-flash sites.

Shopping Carts

We can host a Zen Cart shopping cart and modify it to resemble your chosen template. Please note that the shopping cart imposes its own basic structure—especially on product pages. The best templates for a shopping cart are HTML templates that allow for a full-width top banner (Flash or plain HTML) and an HTML side menu, as in the images shown at right.

Full-flash templates cannot be directly applied to your shopping cart; however, it may be possible to create a introductory site or sub-site using a full-flash template, and then extract elements to use in your shopping cart’s header, etc. A good example of this approach is our full-flash CintronicsOnline.com main site, which links to HTML sub-sections and shopping cart sites whose headers incorporate elements extracted from the full-flash site.

We’ll review your template choices and give you our recommendations. Once we are agreed on the template for your shopping cart, we will proceed with its development, applying your chosen template to your shopping cart as best we can. For more on shopping carts, see "Shopping Cart Hosting/Administration."

A Warning About Image-Based Websites

Some web contractors have taken to offering cut-rate websites based on page-sized jpeg or gif images. These types of websites may look like HTML websites at first glance; however, none of the text can be selected by drawing the cursor over it—as it would be in an HTML website—because all of the text is contained in the image.

Image-based text is not searchable, therefore image-based websites are very unfriendly to search engines and are very unlikely to rank highly in search results—especially in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

The client who has paid for such a website may find that he cannot update it without access to the original authoring files. He finds himself going back to have it updated by the original contractors—cornered in their net, so to speak.

In addition, the viewers of such websites find that they cannot adjust the text to a comfortable size for viewing in their browsers, as the text size is fixed within the image. With our aging population, more and more people need to be able to select a comfortable text size.

Our HTML websites, on the other hand, are fully searchable, search engine friendly, text-size adjustable, and can be updated by any client who is sufficiently knowledgeable about HTML.