Did you custom design your site or use a template? I would love to get a custom designed site but will have to wait until I make some money. Just curious what others feel about this.

Mark

HostLeet.com's design and WHMCS intergration was custom made by PaytonDesigns.com but I've changed the original files quite a bit.

We use a template just for the initial configuration place holder, then once we are ready we created a custom design.

I think templates are fine just starting out, as long as the finished product looks professional.

Definitely custom design. I think that you shall start from the scratch when designing your website. Once ready with the sketch you can pass it to a web designer.

I download my wordpress template.

I've not relied much on templates because web design is what I do. So my sites are hand coded by me, for me, and I have always been more pleased with the results than with anything I could have produced using a template.

This is what keeps you in demand, because not everyone is a designer.

Absolutely definitely Custom design. As for the blog - used a template and added some flavor with hands (but of course on top of the initial template ) Actually right now thinking if it's worth changing the design for Sitevalley.

I used a free template I liked as an example layout & colour sceme for the main page and derived everything else from that myself. I can code HTML/CSS but can't say I'm good at designing, I need something to work towards. I completely redid the example code to make it cross-browser compatible, fixed and changed a lot of the images, optimized it better for search engines and added a lot to it including a footer.

Once you have a small place to start, it gets a lot easier to improve on it. It'll never be perfect the first time.

We are using a custom one. But making templates with MODx is easy if we have some CSS knowledge. But I do not want to compromise for a slick design.

I've never used templates. Although my strengths are in development, I've always got the best result from designing everything myself as well.

I've made inquiries with many designers over the last couple years when I wanted something done that was outside of my specialties, but never have I found a good enough designer that was worth paying as apposed to just expanding my skills to do it myself.

The same thing goes for templates. I can't count how many hours I've spent browsing template sites, but in the long run I've always ended up doing everything 100% myself, from scratch.

Good help is always hard to find

We used a design firm for our current one (we hate it). I recently down loaded a template from template monster and we are going to use some of our new in-house to tweak it. For $65 (what I paid for the template) it can't hurt to try.

We used custom designed, that more make prestige too. There are many web designers could give low price.

I totally agree, because for starting is most needed thing is servers, uptime, quality so it is better to be better at this, not on design