Setting up a business website (or for that matter any website) is not a one step affair. It involves studying the requirement, analyzing the feasibility of the project, designing the web site, server-side coding, testing, marketing the website and maintenance of the business website. As any project manager would immediately realise, this is nothing short of a project and as such two important factors immediately kick in - time and money. How much money can be spent on this project and what are the best ways to reduce cost while maintaining quality? In this short article, we concentrate on how templates can be used to get that professional look to a website while saving on cost and time.

Before we get into the nitty gritties of implementing templates in our projects, let us introduce templatesfactory.net, whose templates will be used as examples in this article. This template provider has more than 12000 templates available for sale on both a per-license and on an exclusive license mode. Each template usually costs between $20 and $200 -  a far lower amount than what it would have costed you if you hired your own designer. Templates are again classified into categories so that you do not get overwhelmed by the sheer number of available resigns. So you have flash intro templates, swish templates, css templates, etc. To find out more on how the program works, we suggest that you read the extensive FAQ available on the website.

Now the most difficult activity while designing your website has changed from hiring a good designer and vetting his work to identifying the most suitable template for your business. Once you have been able to select the template of your choice you can get it customised using the ‘Customize’ link available on each template. But since all templates come with full source code, editing it to add your company name or logo or similar common tasks should be simple and you should be able to do yourself. Now for the payment. You can pay for the template via wire transfer or via credit card (processed by moneybookers). Upon successful payment you will receive a download link to the template. Now your template is ready for use.

Please let us know what you think of the article. Was it informative enough or do you think we could have added more examples to it? Any constructive feedback would be gratefully acknowledged.