When you want something done right, do it yourself.

I have a decent-sized web application project pending, and I am very reluctant to start it. The reason for procrastinating is rooted in not wanting to design yet another website from scratch. It’s a time-consuming process that requires good layout skills, Photoshop skills, not to mention html and CSS skills, as well as decent programming foresight. However, I just want to do the programming, and not the tinkering with Photoshop layers.

So I did the next best thing: I went to Template Monster and bought a template. I figured, it will save me from the creative agony of laying out a site. Well, it really didn’t. As I said, I am trying to avoid designing while focusing on the programming instead. This experience has proven to be more of a pain than a benefit.

• All Flash templates require the heavy Macromedia Flash package (though available free for 30 days) and decent Flash-editing skills.
• Most templates are table-based. What does that mean? Well, if you want to add/remove a row, you can add the tr tags, no problem there. However, if you want to add a column, good freaking luck – now you’re dealing with colspans and the resulting throbbing headache.
• Most templates are poorly coded. On top of table design, each individual cell is endowed with three lines of cell-specific code as opposed to one line of code formatting the entire block in the external CSS file.
• Even Cascading Style Sheets-based templates are poorly coded. The programmer has never formatted such important elements as heading tags and unordered lists.
• You cannot get a refund of your money if the template does not work out for you.

Again, I though it would be smart to just buy a template, format it within an hour, and move on to the heavy lifting. Instead, I’ve spent an hour just learning how the template is written, a couple more hours designing stupid navigation buttons in Photoshop (who the hell still uses images as navigation buttons?), and the rest of the day making the damn template work in Explorer and Firefox.

It’s been nightmarish. And I’m a developer. Don’t buy templates.  Worst $60 you’ll ever spend.