Did you opt to get a personalized template for your website or did you use a free one? If you chose a personalized template, did you create it yourself or hire someone to do it for you?

Are you look for all sorts of websites or just those offering hosting services?

I took a free one and modified it to my liking.

I have hired a person to make the template in PhotoShop cs4 then I come in and code it it saves me some money by me coding it.

Our in house guy does our web design. Works out well.

I think everyone gets inspiration from somewhere we all acquire a style from our own environment though free templates are useful they come into their element when you have a large collection allowing you to mix and match and create something new out of the many parts (essentially what almost all design firms will do, start with a generic and add to it).

Thus free templates are great, but even better when used correctly, however spending £5k on a website that is perfect will only result in hundreds of copies or variations somewhere along the lines, an easy example is the almost standardised method that webhosting packages are displayed (big table with ticks/crosses )

It depends on the site that I'm working on. I have a number of "generic" looking sites that are setup to look just that way, and then I have designs that were customized for certain things. Our old site was a creation that took 2 years in the making, and lasted for 3 years after that with almost no changes. The new design on our hosting page will likely last the same 2-3 years (depending on technology).

The main thing depends on your target market however. Some markets want the flash and glitter, others just want the meat. USUALLY, depending how good of a graphic developer you are, or hire, you can take a free template and mold it into something you want.

Mostly I will recommend to use content management systems to setup and manage your website. Below are some popular CMS which worked in different platform:

ASP.NET CMS
1 - Kentico
2 - Sitefinity

PHP CMS
1 - Joomla
2 - Drupal
3 - Wordpress

You will able to setup your website in short amount of time with all the templates and theme included in the CMS.

Good references, rtccroy. I primarily use Expression Web to design sites, but do offer customized WordPress templates.

Your earlier recomendation in another thread lead me to Expression Web and I've been very impressed so far Leaps and leaps and leaps and bounds beyond FrontPage!

Yes, Expression Web are particularly good for webmasters / developers for designing website with the WYSIWYG HTML editor and general web design program by Microsoft, replacing Microsoft FrontPage. It is part of the Expression Studio suite from Microsoft.

Expression Web allows authoring of web pages integrating XML, CSS 2.1, ASP.NET 2.0, XHTML, XSLT and JavaScript into sites. It requires the .NET Framework 2.0 to operate.
Thanks for the technologies that support both PHP and Silverlight as well.

I tend to use generic until I have time to design and code my own. I can never find something thats really good enough to be perfect. So I tend to stick to opensource templates I can tweak to my hearts desire.

However, sometimes the temp templates last longer than they should since I hand code and can get hung up with newer stuff (such as wordpress) or when life gets in the way.

For most of my sites, I've started with a free template and spent a few hours modifying the graphics and stylesheet to give it a completely fresh look. That's one way to keep costs low and still end up with something unique.

what kind of site are u thinking about?

I think if I started with something generic I probably wouldn't take the time to create a new template! How long does it generally take you to code your own template?