Frontpage Templates

When constructing a building, not even the most original builder starts completely from scratch. More often than not, he or she builds from a set of architectural plans that take useful examples from past buildings and combine them into a new structure. The result is a beautiful combination of personality and form, both old and new at the same time.

Designing a web page is a similar process. Though many people do indeed start from scratch, coding their pages from the ground up, for most amateur and professional designers, this is not an option. Therefore they look to pre-designed sample pages, or templates, to provide a framework for their enterprises.

Templates can be very efficient labor-saving devices. For example, say an employee of the fledgling business Mike's Pet Emporium is working with three other people to create the MikesPetEmporium.com website. Though this employee definitely wants the individual pages in this webpage to be fun and original, he wants each of them to have a similar look, not to mention some common features like the Mike's Pet Emporium logo and graphics. So he creates a template with these elements that the other employees can use as a starting point from that point on.

Many web page authoring programs, such as Microsoft FrontPage, make it easy for users to create templates. Graphics, animation, and fields can all be layered in a way that makes them easily reproducible. This saves time and makes designing a multi-page website much easier than it would be if each individual page had to be created again and again from the ground up.