Hi, I recently paid a designer to create a site and a few people commented saying it looked like a template. The site is www.sg23online.com Any comments/help would be appreciated.
Well, it has the telltales of having been done with a lot of off the shelf dreamweaver functions... As evidenced by the 1997 style MM_Swap functions being used for the mouse-over effects instead of doing the modern faster/leaner/better way of CSS background slides. <p class="MsoNormal"> means the content was cut/paste from word with no adjustment for the fact M$ wurd content sucks for web pages, of course that windows-1252 character set is going to make the page work OH so well under linux or MacOS. <span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Lucida Sans Unicode""> isn't too encouraging either... multiple redundant and unneccessary classes... single row table and table wrapping when neither is necessary or even desirable I hate to say it, but I think you were taken for a ride.
DeathShadow, thanks for your reply. The rollover may have been done in Dreamweaver but that does not make it a template? Secondly, the cut and paste was from a word document as this had the client's information on it so that puts that bit to bed. I've e-mailed the designer asking for his opinion and pointed him to this thread. Does anyone have any other useful pointers?
The classes should have been pulled as a waste of bandwidth - it's the same problem I pointed out with the inline styles on those spans. Makes it two or three times the HTML tags that should have been used and/or are necessary there. I could see them being left in if you were inside a CMS, but you don't appear to be since all the links are .html Well, that is the question - A lot of web designers will see that and go 'oh great, another sleazy Dreamweaver user' - No offense to dreamweaver users, I know you CAN make good code in Dreamweaver, but it makes it too easy for nubes to make bad code, or for people with their heads filled with the nonsense being spewed forth by career educators to churn out a page in five minutes that looks like every other page out there, and call themselves a professional. (Much to the chagrin of people with experience and knowledge - who end up pointing out you spent $500 on five minutes work) I think a lot of people saying 'it looks like a template' is that it's so... Off the shelf looking - artistically. From an artists point of view it LOOKS like 'just another' wordpress/joomla/dreamweaver template with little or nothing to distinguish it from any other site. One oversized excessively tall image banner, crappy 'fixed width' - you're content doesn't even start until 2/3rds of the way down the page... There's a lack of design elements and styling. Seriously, if the base layout took them more than 5 minutes to make, I'd be shocked.
This website is not very good but I don't think that it's made of template. BTW, sometimes sites made of template looks very good.
Maybe it isn't a template.. but then, you can tell your designer to improve on this. Needs a little spicin' up.
I dont think it was made from a template but I think you need to have a chat w/ your designer.. I hope you didnt pay him a lot
Agree with the others. Maybe its not a template, but behind the scenes it is not looking too pretty. Even if they copy/pasted from a word document, they should have gone in there and cleaned it up!
Oh come on guys, the site is not bad at all. And it's not a template. If there is anything really wrong with it, it's the fact that it uses tables which means that one day, it will be obsolete and will have to be recoded in CSS. As far as cleaning up the word cut and paste, maybe they should have, but who cares? I viewed this site in IE6, Firefox, and Opera and it works in all three.
I'm not sure if it looks like a template but the big white SLOGAN HERE in the center of the header image makes it look unfinished.