 Working With Free Website Templates
If you don't want to deal with designers but you don't want to design a website yourself either, there are plenty of websites that would just love to meet you. They sell templates, which are an easy way for anyone to buy an already-existing design and apply it to their website.
Free Templates
A quick search for 'free website templates' turns up a lot of offers. You have to realise, though, that almost any template you get for free is either going to be really very amateurish – looking through the results, in fact, a lot of it is downright nasty. There will also probably be some annoying conditions of use, such as having to link back to the designer's web page from your page, or not being able to use the design commercially.
If you're really determined to get a template for free, a better way of doing it is to use the ones that come for free with whatever software you're using. WordPress, for example, has some very clean, attractive templates.
However you do it, though, you have to realise that free templates will never be unique: your website will look just like hundreds of other websites out there that found the same free template you did.
Cheap Templates
Once you start to get into the territory of paid-for templates, things start to look up. The idea behind sites that sell templates (templatemonster.com is the market-leader) is that they can pay designers a proper rate to do something good once, and then resell it as many times as they want for a relatively low price. This lets designers be paid for as many designs as they want without ever having to deal with customers, and it lets customers buy and use the designs for a much lower price than they'd usually pay for something a lot worse – and that they can't see in advance.
Although the effect isn't quite as bad as with free templates, you still have to understand that other people out there are going to have the same design as you. This can be a problem, especially if you use one of the big template sites and pick the obvious design for the type of site you're running. Used carefully, though, it can be one of the best ways to get a good-looking site up without breaking the bank.
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