Sometimes to succeed in life, you have to cheat a little. 

I’m a big fan of using free templates when building a blog or a website. You often have to tweak them a little bit, adding a personalized header or some graphics of your own. But free templates give you a super foundation to work from.

And I usually change the css stylesheet because I like to mess around with my own colors and fonts.

You can find lots of great, free templates at Open Source Web Design:

Free Templates

Some of these templates work best for blogs, but lots of them work just fine for static websites.

It’s a huge database of pretty and functional designs with designs from all over the world.

I like to go there when I’m in need of inspiration because scrolling through the designs gets me thinking about things. Maybe I SHOULD be doing a website about roller blading or bowls of fruit - the designs look so pretty!

If you’ve never checked out the free templatees at OSWD, you need to stop by there. It’s one of the web’s best kept secrets.

When you’re building your online businesses you have enough to worry about without trying to design your website from scratch.  So use a free template, already! 

I often write about the three tiers of Internet marketing - the three areas that you have to master if you’re going to succeed in making money online.

If you missed them, the three tiers are:

*Technical stuff (web design, coding, etc.)
*Writing
*Marketing

Nobody is going to excel at all three things, so it’s important to be able to “cheat” wherever you can!

Free templates make it a lot easier to get your website going. Even if you’re not 100% thrilled with the design, you can always change it later.

The important thing is to get your sites up NOW so they can start showing up in the search engines and build you traffic over time.

And if you’re intimidated by HTML or CSS, you might also want to pick up two classics in the field:

HTML 4 For Dummies, 5th Edition

 

CSS Web Design For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

HTML is the coding of the web pages themselves, and it’s not hard to learn.  It’s much like working in Word to correct spelling or grammar. HTML is really just another language. If you pick up a few books on it you’ll quickly learn how to edit things like links, tables, and paragraphs within your pages when something goes wrong.

CSS stands for cascading style sheets, and many blog and web designs use these. A CSS stylesheet is a page that sits outside the actual visible pages of your website and it has all the design specifications for your entire site - like what size font you want to use in your headers, what color background you’re using, and what color your navigation buttons will be. Each of these features is easy to change by hand - you can tweak them in just a few seconds and make your site look the way you want just by changing a few things in your CSS stylesheet.

But it will all look like Greek to you if you don’t learn a little CSS. It’s easy to pick up from the For Dummies books.

Don’t be afraid to jump right in, using as many free and inexpensive tools as you can, and get your sites up.

The quicker they’re up, the quicker you’ll be making money!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 6:36 am and is filed under Free Goodies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.