Web Design Tools

So Saturday is usually the day I post a link to some clever photoshop tutorial that I have stumbled upon while browsing the web. Not today. Today I have 2 words to share ... Template Monster. Oh my gosh, this last week I have been digging through this resource site and have found at least a dozen web design templates I want to try out. Template Monster makes me feel like a kid in a candy store.

Art Paw and most of my other sites were designed by me from scratch in Dreamweaver. Back in 1998 we started our very first site and my husband actually built it using raw code. We threw it up ( sounds lovely right), we threw it up on to our free member homepage with earthlink. A year or so later we got our own domain and I started tinkering with site design and taught myself Dreamweaver over time. I still have tons to learn and feel like you never stop learning when it comes to the web since it all changes so fast. The cool thing is today there are so many resources out there to help you along.

This month we are celebrating our 8th Birthday here at Art Paw. A few of our early pages can still be found using the way back machine. We had some cool colors working for us, but I made a lot of design mistakes back then, yea, comic sans to start with. At least we can still laugh at ourselves. We still laugh when we think about how hard Dan worked to figure out how to code some silly little moving text sales blurb that ran across your screen when the site loaded. Like most web-animation it was sort of cool "once" then quickly became irritating. Ah well ... live and learn.


With so much on my plate right now I think the next web project I tackle will be created by modifying a pre-existing template ... heck why not. Template Monster is a great resource for any small business owner that wants to try creating or updating their website on their own. You still have to own some sort of web design software program to make any sort of pre-fab web template work well for your own needs.