1 Hour Web Site: 120 Professional Templates and Skins (Bible) (Paperback)

Creating a good web site requires both computer/technical and graphic design/artistic skills. If you have the technical background but are lacking in artistic talent, then templates will provide the "design" elements you are lacking.

The book advertises 120 templates on the accompanying CD, but that is really 40 different templates, each one provided in 3 color schemes for you to choose from. They provide a "home" page and 1 or more "subpage" styles for each template. There is a brief, simple explanation at the beginning of the book about types of designs and which type to use for what purpose. The designs are adequate for informational sites; they are not sufficient if you need interactive forms, shopping carts, flash, animation etc.

The other advantage of using a template is you do not have to learn any other software. The book explains how to open the files in an editor like Notepad, and simply find/replace their content with your content. The files have been set up with easy-to-identify "tokens" to find and replace. This saved me a lot of time because I didn't want to learn any other software. (Of course you can always open these files in your favorite program and edit them that way)

However, it is unlikely that any of the provided templates will suit your needs exactly - so it helps if you know enough html to be able to modify the html code - it will help to understand tables and cascading style sheets. If you use their templates "as is" and just replace content "tokens", you could likely create a home page in an hour.

If you have sufficient computer expertise and just need to get a simple, well designed web site up quickly, this book could be the answer. However, you must be flexible enough to either use one of the templates "as is" or modify the html code to suit your needs. So read the table of contents and check out the template categories, and make sure your website falls within at least one of those categories.

I was able to find a template that was close to my needs, and edit the html to modify it enough to suit my purpose. Since the template was created by a graphic designer, the site looks "professional". So this book suited my needs exactly. J. Compton