Thread: Designing sites without a graphical bone in my body?

Hi Lads,
Just wondering what the recommendations are on this one? I know most of ye are pretty on the ball with all ranges of web development but for me my coding is ok but I don't have design skills. Would people recommend buying templates? Would you have any recommended sites for this? I was happy to use template monster before but if this is the route I'm going then I'd probably need something cheaper?
Thanks
Gary

As a Web designer, I don't really recommend buying templates for obvious reasons, if you have to, Web Templates, WordPress Themes - ThemeForest looks ok, Template Monster are a joke in my opinion.

Ya I wouldnt really describe myself as a web designer, I'm not creative. I might call myself a site put togetherer

Some of them are pretty nice all right.

Stupid question but I've time on my hands to look up a few things now.

There's a way of splitting the code, design and database but i've forgotten the name of it? - EDIT Model View Controller

Do you use this with the likes of phpcake etc? Thinking of revamping a few sites.

Where do I go to read up on that kinda thing?

sorry so many questions, too much coffee i reckon!

MVC

Model View Controller ... yep ... separate out your logic. Its a bit of a jump to get started with. There are other design philosophies out there but this is the one that is used mostly by the web dev frameworks

Rails / Cake / Zend / CodeIgniter and so on all adhere to this philosophy

Where to learn ?

Go to their sites .. watch the sample videos on putting together a blog. This is usually 15 - 30 minutes and takes you through the whole thing. Decide if its for you or not. After that .... go back and do a bit of reading on MVC ... and then start to play around.

Drupal , Joomla! etc i.e. a CMS would typically follow the MVC pattern or something similar also. So why not use one of those for your sites?

Wordpress have some very pleasant templates. I chose Treba, as it is so gentle on the eye. Release of Treba theme - If..Else Log

Try get a book on dreamweaver and try it yourself .