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The beauty of a content management system is it's simplicity of design. Typically only one design template is used throughout the website so that there is a common design theme on every page.

What is a template?

A template is simply one web design that dictates what every other web page on the website will look like.

What is the benefit of a template?

Time and Money Saved. Without a template, updating your webpages would require that each page be manually updated. Without a template, if you were to add a webpage, that link would need to be manually added to every webpage on your website. With a template it's all done automatically. The time it takes to manualy update 50 webpages will cost you alot of money or time. Either way it's a pain and eventually the desire to manually add content to your website site fades leaving you with a tired old website.

Templates separate design from content. With templates, you can update content without worrying about breaking the design.

Updating the look and feel is quick. If at some point your websites design needs to be updated, it is a simple and painless process as every page of your site will update itself instantly. In the past, you could find yourself paying to have hundreds of pages edited and rewritten.

I've heard templates are bad, are they really?

I think what web designers are talking about are "generic templates". A generic template is one that everyone has and doesn't allow your business to be reflected through your website.

At iMakeSense, we keep design and functionality separate. We'll get you setup with a basic template that will be personalized (not customized) to your business at no extra cost.

Design is expensive. If you have the extra money for design, we have designers that can make your site as pretty and unique as you like. It's just that you have the option now to spend your money on design or use it elsewhere.

Go ahead and automatically change the template now.

While this is not normally apart of the CMS we have added a small script for this demo site to allow you to easily change the template without having to go to the Admin panel.

Try it here.

A quick word about the iMakeSense Templating System.

This is for all the developers out there who are curious about the templating system. It's a custom system. I was looking into using the Smarty Templating System but wasn't smart enough to figure it out (This seems to be a common theme with me... ). I also wanted something that worked with Dreamweaver, Frontpage or any other WYSIWYG editor out there. I hate being able to design a template in html, it's just slower. The template requires basic database markers for the content management system. I then parse out the html, database markers and create a template file that the CMS uses. It's quick and efficient.