Download How to Modify Website Templates as a PDF
You can download the How to Modify Website Templates guide for easy reference, it’s a little long to post here. The guide is designed to let anyone who has a reasonable level of computer literacy produce a fully functioning template-based web site. I walk you through the necessary steps that will allow you to modify your template to include your details, images and links. Due to the different types of web templates out there, I can’t guarantee how applicable this guide will be to all of them, but the basic principles taught here are universal and many of them can be used across the board.
Web site templates offer a powerful alternative to building a web site from scratch, especially for people who wish to do it themselves, but don’t have the time or inclination to learn all of the relevant skills. Templates allow you to produce professional sites with little technical knowledge. Modifying a template presents it’s own complications however, and this guide aims to walk you through the steps in an easy to follow approach designed to let you produce a web site quickly while avoiding potential pitfalls.
The tutorial makes use of the sample template freely available from one of my other sites, Eight-Eight-Template, and will walk you through the steps to modifying the text and images of this template using techniques that apply to any template.
The applications I use in the tutorial are Macromedia Dreamweaver for the HTML files, Adobe Photoshop for the image manipulation, and Macromedia Flash for the Flash file editing. Trial versions of these applications are available for free 30-day use from the Macromedia web site and the Adobe web site. Other applications can be used for modifying these types of files and you can find further advice and suggestions at the Eight-Eight-Template web site resources page.
I would recommend that you first run through this tutorial using your template to get to know it and keep a copy of the zip file you downloaded in a separate directory so that you have an unmolested copy to work with when you want to create your final site. Then you can unzip the files again and work with those to create the final design.
