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deepsix
Joined:
12 May 2005
Posts:
10
Location:
Port Coquitlam, BC, Canada
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Posted: Wed May 18, 2005 8:38 pm
Post subject: Are Templates Necessary?
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Hi Everyone,
I discovered affiliate marketing about a month ago and have since done major reading and research about it (but not at work....is my boss reading this?). I have picked my niche and come up with about 95 ideas for content for my site.
Also, I have decided to buy James Martell's book to get myself started. After reading so much about other's successes, I have decided that:
a. This is not a scam; and
b. If it is, I live close enough to James Martell to protest outside his house with a big sign!! (jk) 
My question is, do I need to buy Frontpage templates when I'm ready to start my site? I'm really pretty good at all things Microsoft Office already and looking at the standard templates, I think I could probably design one myself. Am I missing something here or is there another reason for buying a template other than ease of design?
Just trying to budget this all out ahead of time. Thanks for your answers!
VB |
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dabrat76
Joined:
12 Feb 2005
Posts:
164
Location:
Montreal, Canada
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Posted: Wed May 18, 2005 10:02 pm
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Hi Deepsix,
If you're going to buy the book, try and reward someone here by clicking on their affiliate link. Conveniently, I have one on my blog if you can't find any 
As for the template, well, everyone has their own reason, but most will tell you it's to save time. And time saved is time put towards writing articles or anything else related to your site.
I thought I could design a simple template too, but after 3 hours of work and getting nowhere fast (ok, maybe I have a bit of ADD) I decided the time spent wasn't worth it.
As a matter of fact, for $30-70 you can get lovely templates. I don't think that's too much. The site in my signature is from apixelpixie.com and my dog site's (www.a1-dog-info.com) template is from rtbwizards.com. (neither are affiliate links)
It basically boils down to whether you want to spend your time or your money.
Tara 
_________________
Golden Pine Cone Templates - so many choices and so easy to use! (And yes, they're pretty cheap too!)
Colin McDougall's VEO Report - I can't say enough good things about it! |
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Andrea Thomson
Joined:
14 Sep 2004
Posts:
110
Location:
Vancouver, BC Canada
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Tanya T.
Joined:
14 Nov 2004
Posts:
80
Location:
Australia
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Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 3:14 am
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Hi Deepsix,
I was wondering the same thing myself a few month ago. I didn't have Frontpage, but have Dreamwear. So instead of byuing a templet I was determent to learn Dreamwear enough to design my own site.
I have only one James' style site (it is my signature), did it in Dreamwear without a templet. It is doing all right so far.
I suppose tempelets are for convinience and saving time, but if you can design your site yourself, there is no reason why you shouldn't.
And James book definitely isn't a scam. It is a solid step by step guid to buiding your site. I think most people here would agree - if you put enough effort into it, you will see nice rewards 
best luck in your project
_________________
Good luck to you all!
Tanya
Want to know about contact lenses and where to get them cheap?
http://www.1-contact-lenses-consumer-guide.com |
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dabrat76
Joined:
12 Feb 2005
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164
Location:
Montreal, Canada
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LivingFree
Joined:
18 Feb 2005
Posts:
16
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Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 6:08 am
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The sites I have that are templates that look great and polished are the ones that sell the least.. The ones that are plain jane sites, are the ones that do the best, at least that is my experience..
I don't think it really matters as long as you have content, people are seeking what you are selling, and good basic navigation and you're gonna make money if you don't quit.. |
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deepsix
Joined:
12 May 2005
Posts:
10
Location:
Port Coquitlam, BC, Canada
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Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 3:58 pm
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Thanks for the good advice everyone. I think I may give the design a go myself first and if I get exasperated with it, I'll buy a template. (I've seen the Golden Pinecone templates and they look great...I'll have to look at the PixelPixie ones) I'm so excited about getting this site going. I've looked in the search engines and can't find anything like it......good news I hope.
Good to see that other Canadians are giving this a go and having good results. Silly, but that was my first reason for believing in JM and his system....he's a Canuck! |
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Bsnrjones
Joined:
09 Mar 2005
Posts:
24
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Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 9:22 pm
Post subject: I buy templates!
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I always buy templates. For me it comes down to the fact that there is not revenue generating aspect to spending your time building the "shell" of the site.
I would rather pay a SMALL fee and purchase a nice simple template. This allows me to immediately start adding content (article pages), which is really where the money is. The faster you can get your site online, with content, the faster the money will start arriving at your bank account.
Just my 2 cents...
Burke |
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defrag
Joined:
10 Jun 2005
Posts:
27
Location:
CA
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 7:59 pm
Post subject: Re: I buy templates!
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| Bsnrjones wrote: | I always buy templates. For me it comes down to the fact that there is not revenue generating aspect to spending your time building the "shell" of the site.
Burke |
Agree 100% Unfortunately, most template packages are loaded with multiple predesigned pages I don't use and costs me a great deal of time to delete or lots of extra code that isn't needed. I've used basictemplates.com for a couple of years and have been very happy with their designs. I've never really understood why designers develop multi-page templates.  |
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defrag
Joined:
10 Jun 2005
Posts:
27
Location:
CA
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 8:02 pm
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Andrea,
Is this your website? tableLESS templates for fast loading results |
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defrag
Joined:
10 Jun 2005
Posts:
27
Location:
CA
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 8:09 pm
Post subject:
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| dabrat76 wrote: | | As a matter of fact, for $30-70 you can get lovely templates. I don't think that's too much. The site in my signature is from apixelpixie.com and my dog site's (www.a1-dog-info.com) template is from rtbwizards.com. |
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but for $5.00 you can get a much better template at basictemplates. And if you look at the source code on the dog site you mentioned, it has tons of font and color tags that the stylesheet should be controlling on its own. If this is the way the template was designed out-of-the-box, whoever designed it doesn't understand css and is making it harder for this website owner. 
Just my opinion. I'm new here and don't want to make waves with anyone, but I hate to see someone being taken advantage of by designers who are in the elementary stages of web design. |
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dabrat76
Joined:
12 Feb 2005
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164
Location:
Montreal, Canada
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Andrea Thomson
Joined:
14 Sep 2004
Posts:
110
Location:
Vancouver, BC Canada
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Posted: Sat Jun 18, 2005 12:57 am
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Hi All -
Defrag writes...
| Quote: | | I've never really understood why designers develop multi-page templates. |
The pages contained in my templates are mini-templates for affiliate sites.
The pages don't all contain the same navigation - so the template itself provides you with a framework for your entire website.
| Quote: | | Just my opinion. I'm new here and don't want to make waves with anyone, but I hate to see someone being taken advantage of by designers who are in the elementary stages of web design. |
no offense taken
it's not my template anyhow... but you should note that with a frontpage template, you also have a frontpage user. Not all webmasters know how to pull the css classes into their page - so you will find even great templates which contain font tags.
GoldenPinecone Templates are all w3.org compliant with external CSS - compatible in Safari (Mac). FireFox, Opera, Netscape, and IE... so I'm very proud of the quality provided to Affiliates.
Of course, if you're experience enough to clean-up a $5 template --
that's clearly a great option for you. Most of my customers are knowingly outsourcing this effort as their time is better spent working on the content - money well worth the knowledge of getting a solid product not requiring tweaks.
And... I'm a Canuck! And an affiliate with 10+ sites earning $ - What more could you want !! 
_________________
Andrea Thomson
professional web designs .:. affordable templates ... and coming soon affiliate templates |
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defrag
Joined:
10 Jun 2005
Posts:
27
Location:
CA
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Posted: Sat Jun 18, 2005 11:07 am
Post subject:
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| Andrea Thomson wrote: | | if you're experience enough to clean-up a $5 template -- |
Not sure what you mean by "clean-up", Andrea, unless you mean general customizing that everyone should do like putting in my own metas, doctype, charset, content, photos, etc. and then checking for w3c compliance after everything has been done - not before. I too make a great deal of money with my 42 websites; I'm not a newbie (1996 full time aff) nor do I use FP anymore. Even though you say your templates start out being w3c compliant, the end user may wish to use (most likely) a different charset, doctype, standard, etc. based on their geo-location, programming, target market, etc. Frontpage is also known to add tons of ugly and heavy proprietary code.
The reason I asked whether you designed the templates located at the pinecone site and the seo designs site is because these sites are not using CSS correctly (exactly like the dog website I mentioned earlier in this thread), they are not w3c compliant, and appear to need a great deal of code clean-up.  I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm sure you work hard at designing your templates and promoting your aff sites, and probably don't have the time to work on your own code. I'm just making observations and stating what I'm seeing -since you are claiming w3c compliance and pure css in your templates. You are not alone though, I find this happens a great deal with template designers who claim their designs are compliant.
Example, this page contains the mis-use of font and color tags. These tag properties should be in the ext css file. I didn't look further on your sites.
http://www.goldenpinecone.com/templates/index.html
Anyway, I wish you well and hope I've not offended you. Just trying to help. It's not good biz to promote one thing and do another.
| Quote: | | but you should note that with a frontpage template, you also have a frontpage user. Not all webmasters know how to pull the css classes into their page |
LOL. It's far easier and much faster (since we are all using our time wisely in aff biz) for anyone to learn how to assign css classes to an HTML tag (less than 3 minutes) than it is to learn how to use the Frontpage program to delete unneeded pages, etc.
| Quote: | | The pages contained in my templates are mini-templates for affiliate sites. The pages don't all contain the same navigation - so the template itself provides you with a framework for your entire website. |
I've found it takes far less time for me to delete or insert a column using my HTML editor or copy/paste a nav menu to change the original template into another layout (less than 5 minutes) than to delete/edit/revise unneeded pages, change/check hyperlinks (over an hour). I too would rather spend my time writing content and not re-editing a multi-page template package. But that's me. Anyway, here's to your success. I believe we will have to respectfully agree to disagree. |
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Rose
Joined:
22 Nov 2003
Posts:
13
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Posted: Sat Jun 18, 2005 4:34 pm
Post subject:
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I used a basictemplates.com template for my dog care site (link is in signature if you want to have a look). But then I've also been building my own sites for 5 years, so the CSS was easier to figure out when I wanted to make a few changes to it.
Also, knowing HTML, I could move the template around somewhat to better suit what I wanted (more James Martell style...without "looking" like a James copycat site.... Once you know the style he uses as well as all his affiliates, it's easy to spot them). But for $5, you could probably find a simple site template and give it a try. Just make a backup copy of the original. If you find it too hard, set the template aside for now and once you become more versed in HTMl and such, you can go back an use it.
The problem with Frontpage is that it can mess up your affiliate codes as well (or so I've heard...I don't use it so don't know if that's true or not). Learning to code at least basic HTML pages is still the best option. Many templates can be confusing if you're not careful. But that's just my 2 cents worth.
Edit: I also just thought of this. I've convereted all my sites to use Server Side Includes (.shtml extention). I use it on the navigation menu, as well as for promoting products on all my pages which are related to that particular category. For instance, for the Canine Nutrition Category, all pages that deal with this topic have an SSI code line that will show products on Nutrition. If one of those products is discontinued, I only need to change it on one file and all pages with that particular "include" code update as well. A good place to learn about what SSI does: http://www.bignosebird.com/ssi.shtml
Hope I didn't confuse you to much with this info
_________________
Rose Smith
Unique Wedding Theme Planning
Natural Dog Health Care |
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