How Difficult Is It To Edit A Bought Template ?

Have found a template i klie the look of for my website (which is up but not looking to professional)

http://www.hypertemplates.com/search/page1.html?keyword=7770

but before i buy it i would like to ask you experts here, how easy/hard is it to edit (i mean transferring my own pictures and text and stuff like that.)
I havent done anything in dreamweaver and stuff before and just know photoshop really thats all.
Do you think i could do it myself? what level/time would it require
thanks for any advice

chris

Edited August 9, 2005 by microscopic^earthling (see edit history)

but before i buy it i would like to ask you experts here, how easy/hard is it to edit (i mean transferring my own pictures and text and stuff like that.)

I havent done anything in dreamweaver and stuff before and just know photoshop really thats all.

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I have got some free template for changing them to become my webpages. Some are made in .psd (photoshop), and some are amd in .swf (flash). I don't really know them much, but I just try them.

 

The .psd can be modified in photoshop. I mean the text. Of course, if you don't have the fonts author used, it will be odd. Of course, you can pich any other fonts you want.

 

The .swf is a trouble problem. I open it in the flash, the playing window pup up and no modification functionalities can be selected. Yes, it can not be modified. If this is what you buy, you mush think it over. By the way, I hope to ask this. How to convert the .swf into a file which can be modified in flash or other tools?

I think the level of experience/time needed to customize any template really depends on how organized and complex the components are. I've seen templates that only required 2 or 3 minor changes to be fully customized, and I've seen some that take days or even weeks to get right (which is usually the kind that I get asked to take care of)That is a beautiful template, and the functionality I think is amazing. Given the initial appearance and complexity of this particular template, and assuming you just want to change text and content, I say you should have a fully customized template in a couple hours. If you want to do a lot of image and effects editing, it might take the whole day or even a few. Of course, I don't have any real experience with flash, but if you do I'm pretty sure you'll be able to do all of it yourself. Usually with a flash template, you just have to edit a text file with the url's and content... the rest I guess you'll have to know a bit about Photoshop and have some type of flash editing program like Fireworks or something. If you're pressed for time, not sure how, or just plain lazy I could look at it a little bit for you (at least with the psd and html anyway). I just moved to West Virginia and have no car, so I have nothing better to do LolBest of luck, and be sure to post up the final product, I'd love to see it

Have found a template i klie the look of for my website (which is up but not looking to professional)

 

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This template is Flash. In order to make changes to this you would have to know Flash pretty well and have a copy of Flash to make the changes. If you use the .html version then you could replace the graphics fairly easily, but you would lose the movement and interactivity that may be the attraction for you. I do programming in Flash, and trying to re-work a Flash movie is not very easy to do. The movie works because of the graphics that are included, and changing that throws everything off. It would be more efficient, most of the time, to just start from scratch and make your own Flash movie.

 

The bottom line is, unless you like what you see and want to use exactly what you pay for, don't waste your money. Either learn to do it yourself, or hire someone to create your vision for your site. Reading your post, I am pretty sure you will regret paying the $65 for this template.

 

Rodney Lay

To me, if you have no experiences with Flash or don't have the Flash program, then don't buy it. You also have to look at the required programs in order to be able to fully manipulate the template for your website. I'd prefer you either aquire the programs required to edit it and learn it OR just buy an ordinary HTML template.However if you are just changing the text content of the site which are embedded on the flash movie .swf You might not need to open up the .fla file which requires a flash program (v6.0+) But before you buy it, make sure that the template loads strings either via .txt file or .xml file. This you've got to ask the company if they don't tell you about it.All in all, I recommend you learn Flash if you're going to have flash movies in your site.

I work in video, but I did web programming before hand. There are a lot of folks in my business that have flash sites because they are "trendy" etc. I hate flash with a passion. I want my pages to load fast, whether the user has broadband or dial up. Recently I've been doing a lot of VHS to DVD transfers for people. (Pays my rent) and most don't have broadband yet. So my site needs to be quick. So I have simple images and text thanks to .Mac. Since I pay $100 a year for the account figured I might as well use it for something. And with iweb, it's easy to manage. So...Anyway, I used to always purchase my templates. Now I made sure they were created for GoLive, the editor I was using at the time, and rarely had any problems. To me, it was quicker to get the template and begin editing text then creating from scratch. I was charging around $500 per site at the time so, even if it cost me $50 for the template...eventually I signed on to a site with 3000 templates that charged a yearly $750 fee and you could download as many as you wanted and those were the templates I used.

Edited September 8, 2006 by unimatrix (see edit history)

To be quite honest, when I first downloaded a template, I was shocked with the number of folders that a template contains, each with a massive amount of material. With careful study, I figured out that most of the stuff is really easy to understand. Now, quite a few bought templates will actually give you ooptions which will allow you to go about customizing to a very high degree. The free ones, you just have to replace the images, work a bit on the CSS and pat - you're ready to go. The first step before you buy a template is to go ahead and experiment with fome free templates so that you get the hang of customizing and you're not to sorry if things don't go your way for a while. From experience, I can tell you that even a novice will easily manage to get everything right by the second try. Personally I started off with PHP-Nuke - which was a fantastic experience and I just loved going about modifying my site and working on the look and feel. I have since moved to Dragonfly CMS which I'm finding a lot easier to handle - with out any bugs thus far. All the best

Templates are generally fairly easy to manipulate the way you want, but that all depends on the template itself. The question is, is it worth it?You could probably make your own from scratch (even if a beginner) with some time and a few tutorials to match the one you like.Especially good if you use PHP and use the include directive instead of putting the same header/footer sidebar etc code literally into every single file.

Being a web designer, I think that modifying a template is really easy. Its just a matter of how everything set up. If the designer that created the template organized the template it will be very simple to modify. But if everything is all over the place and scattered you might run into problems on what is what.I am one of the designers that group certain things in certain folders. For example I would keep all the design files in one folder and another folder for the CSS sheets and such. But if it were my advice to you, i think buying templates is necessary only if you dont have any type of design experience. Because any tempalte seen on template sites can be imitated to some degree.

Yeah orgnaising things in that way I think is really good, eg: css folder, js folder, psd folder, login/registration folder, forum folder etc.

The price for a 'base' template I viewed was $60 (I assume USD) and a personalizerd one was $2600. I could do a lot of 'fixing' for the difference in price.

$2600 for a personalized one? Ouch.For a custom or personalized one (with some time) I would do it for like $50/$100 (depending on what needs to be done). But $2600 is a bit much, maybe for some large company website lol.

Look it's easy to manage ur template some sites give u control panel and is very easy to edit it.But i think that site u gave doesnt give control panel if u want search google and u find sites with cp. I give u some but i dont know if i banned for advertisment. .If u want pm to give u.

Edited November 2, 2006 by napolewn (see edit history)