| Our website templates for Mergemill are
all original designs. However they may be used by any number
of websites. If you really want your site to look unique,
purchase other ready-made templates and adapt them to your
website. Check out relevant Google links for professional
web design templates online.
You may also create your own website template from scratch.
We will share with you how we produce ours, which may reduce
your work.
Start with Sketches
When we sketch the layout designs on paper, we always assume
using HTML tables to structure the web pages. Don't use
frames if possible. They make it hard for you to optimize
your web pages well for search engines, and they also make
it hard for your visitors to bookmark your pages.
Create Graphics
Once we have a layout sketch, we open an 800 x 400 pixel
canvas in Adobe Photoshop to create the graphics
and test web color themes for the 750-pixel wide web page
template.
We use Photoshop's Pen and shape tools to draw
the outline of the graphic elements, and then separate them
and their color fills into layers so that we can move them
and change their colors easily.
Finally we use the Slice tool to cut out the graphic
elements to fit the simplest HTML table structure, and use
Photoshop's Save for Web feature to generate the
optimized GIF files.
Build Sample Web Pages
We take some pages from our website to create a sample
web page for each layout structure using the first color
theme set of the new graphics. We use Macromedia Dreamweaver
MX to do this.
Create the Web Page Templates
After the sample web pages are tested to look and behave
as we desire, we create a copy. We open the copies in Dreamweaver
again, switch to Code View, and replace the content
text with Mergemill field tags. Finally, we add all Mergemill
control tags necessary to make our website templates as
flexible as possible.
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