The Best Website Template Providers

Tuesday, October 8th

2024 Website Template Provider Reviews

Elegant Themes

• Drag and drop visual builder
• 2,000+ premade WordPress templates
• 40+ modular page elements
• Motion and 3D effects
• Responsive design
• eCommerce features
• Widespread community support
• 30-day money-back guarantee

While Elegant Themes does offer website templates, the company is best known for its popular and versatile Divi WordPress theme builder and page builder system. The over 2,000 pre-made website templates Elegant Themes publishes are therefore built using Divi and can be imported into a WordPress website for further customization. You can also design and build a website completely from scratch directly within the Divi theme and page builder system. And, for WordPress themes from other vendors, you can use the separate Divi Builder Plugin to enable Divi Visual Builder features.

Intuitive Visual Builder

The core of Divi is its Visual Builder experience. It's not just a drag-and-drop editor but a whole inline editing and design interface that allows you to create a mobile responsive site in exactly the same way the user will see it when it's published. You can quickly add and configure sections, rows with one or multiple columns, and modules of varying types of content into a flexible grid.

Full-featured Modules

There are over 40 modular page elements including simple things like buttons, images, and text as well as a pricing table, contact form, email-opt-in, bar counters, audio, countdown timer, gallery, and more. If you need a more specific module, the thriving Divi add-ons marketplace more than likely has something that will fit your needs. If not, and because Divi is extensible, you can hire someone to make whatever custom modules you need.

Feature rich

Elegant Themes provides an incredible number of features in their product. These include:

• Drag and drop visual builder with responsive inline editing to design and edit the page exactly as the user will see it
• Multi-select, find-and-replace, copy/paste, and bulk style and content editing of multiple page items at once
• 2,000+ premade WordPress templates with advanced design features and royalty-free photos, icons, and illustrations
• 40+ modular page elements and theme builder system with global element capabilities
• Ability to save and share modules, pages, and whole themes via a cloud storage service as well as export modules, pages, and themes to JSON file for backup and import to another site
• Motion and 3D effects, hover states, transforms, and shape dividers
• Responsive design out of the box
• eCommerce features and support for WooCommerce with customization of layouts
• Marketing features like email opt-in lead generation, split testing, social media sharing, and contact forms
• Editor user interface translated into 32 languages
• Choice in pricing between one simple and affordable lifetime membership option or a yearly subscription
• Widespread community support and component marketplace
• Responsive and helpful live chat-based support 24/7
• Elementor Free version to try out with limited features
• 30-day money-back guarantee
• Extensive free documentation and tutorials with downloadable and importable starter layouts

Global Element Styling

If you want to define global styles for color, typography, spacing, margins, and other design elements, you can do so within global editing tools. You can also select multiple elements, or use find-and-replace or copy-and-paste, to do bulk style and content editing of multiple items on each page all at once.

Supreme Portability

Divi is extremely versatile and portable. Once you finish modifying a module, page, or a whole theme, you can store a copy of it in the Divi Cloud for later use on other sites or sharing with others. Or you can download a copy of a module, row, section, page, or theme as a JSON file to import into another site, as a backup, or to send to another Divi user to import into their design.

Advanced Visual Design

Divi has advanced design features such as hover states, transforms, shape dividers, and 3D effects all without writing code. If you do need to modify something beyond Divi's native capabilities, you have total control over that with CSS and other custom code.

Mobile Responsiveness By Default

Divi's default is to automatically create responsive pages so that they change gracefully to adapt to every screen size. You can use the Visual Builder to easily make additional customizations to mobile and tablet screen sizes beyond the defaults.

Magazine-Enabled Theme Design

For newsletter-like publications or news sites, Divi has a separate product called "Extra” that allows you to publish articles in a pre-made magazine-like theme.

WooCommerce Design Support

For eCommerce sites, Divi supports WooCommerce with its own set of modules for the shopping cart, checkout, product, buttons, and other controls. They're completely customizable so you can make unique designs that go far beyond what the default WooCommerce pages provide.

Marketing Tools and Integrations

For marketing, Divi has the ability to perform split testing to see which version of a particular section, row, or module people engage with the most. You can add email opt-in lead generation with the Elegant Themes Bloom plugin and social media sharing buttons with their Monarch plugin.

Costs

Elegant Themes has two pricing models that customers can choose from:

• $89/year for unlimited website activations
• $249 one-time for lifetime, unlimited website activations

Vendor Stability and Longevity

Elegant Themes isn't going away anytime soon. The company employs over 150 developers and designers and publishes new Divi layouts each month. And, documentation for Divi is plentiful on Elegant Themes with video tutorials and blog posts demonstrating how to do everything Divi enables. There are also dozens of helpful third-party blogs and YouTube accounts that frequently post Divi tutorials as well as Facebook groups where you can ask questions. Nick Roach, the founder and CEO of Elegant Themes, is known to answer questions on Facebook groups, especially when a new feature is about to be released or a problem users are having might result in a new feature being added.

Comprehensive and Helpful Support

If you need additional help, just use the ever-available chat icon on the Elegant Themes website to tell a support representative what you are trying to accomplish. They will even be able to use a special support feature of Divi to log into your website securely and figure out any issues. If any extra styling code is needed, they will often helpfully provide examples that you can copy and paste right into your CSS styles. Agencies, studios, and individual developers and designers who specialize in Divi are plentiful if you need to do something truly custom - or if you simply want to outsource or hire a design and development team.

Return On Investment With A Single Site Launch

The cost for everything Elegant Themes offers-including Divi, Extra, Monarch, and Bloom-is very affordable at $89 per year or $249 for a lifetime subscription and use of Divi on unlimited websites. Both pricing options include a 30-day money-back guarantee. The $249 lifetime subscription easily pays for itself with one successful website.

#1 For Website Templates

After looking through the comprehensive solution Divi offers, which goes far beyond just website templates and into actually helping non-technical users achieve highly-professional website design, we give Divi our highest recommendation.

Elementor

• Drag and drop editor
• Mobile responsive editing
• Motion and 3D effects
• eCommerce features
• 25+ Elementor add-ons
• Marketing features
• Free documentation and tutorials
• 30-day money-back guarantee

Elementor is a highly-advanced and mature drag-and-drop website editing and templating system for WordPress websites. The Elementor Kit Library is a set of over 100 responsive website templates organized under 20 different categories from Beauty & Hair to Travel & Tourism. Every template can be directly imported and edited using the Elementor page builder tools.

Real-Time Browser-Based WYSIWYG Design

With Elementor, as you shape your design and edit your pages, you'll be able to view in real time exactly what users will see, all without having to switch between browser tabs and designer tools. What you see is what you get.

Mobile Responsive Design Tools

Elementor is mobile-responsive right out of the box, with design support for up to seven different screen sizes. A selector tool in the Elementor user interface allows you to immediately see what your page will look like on smaller screens and make your adjustments accordingly.

Lots of features

Elementor offers an impressive number features. These include:

• Drag and drop editor with 300+ designer-made templates and 100+ widgets
• Mobile responsive editing supports design for up to 7 device screen sizes
• Live editing of the website to see the design come together as the user will see it
• Workflow management with global color and font settings and global editing
• UI kits library with import and export of parts or whole templates
• Motion and 3D effects
• eCommerce features and support for WooCommerce
• Marketing features for landing pages, forms, popups, and dynamic content as well as integrations with popular marketing tools
• 25+ Elementor add-ons and hundreds of third-party add-ons and integrations
• Widespread community support and component marketplace
• Responsive and helpful live chat-based support 24/7
• Editor user interface translated into all major languages
• Pricing options for the website builder + hosting, or just the website builder
• 30-day money-back guarantee
• Extensive free documentation, tutorials, and support from Elementor and the Elementor community

Global Style Settings

For global settings such as color, typography, and other controls, Elementor has a settings management interface that allows you to establish the foundation of the common aesthetics for every page.

User Interface Kits Library

Elementor has a UI kit library of 100+ website templates that you can import into your site as a design starting point for modification and for the addition of your own content. You can use motion and 3D effects to beautify and add pizzazz to your custom or imported designs.

Support for WooCommerce

eCommerce websites that use Elementor will benefit from its support for WooCommerce modules and checkout flows. You can design your eCommerce website to look exactly like you want it to rather than have to stick with the default WooCommerce look and feel.

Marketing Components and Integrations

Elementor has features for better marketing your site by facilitating landing pages, forms, popups, and dynamic content. It also supports third-party marketing tool integrations such as email marketing, social media, analytics, and optimization. From A(Weber) to Z(apier), you'll benefit from dozens of marketing extras.

24/7 Support and Community Presence

If you ever need help with Elementor, you can benefit from 24/7 customer support via live chat where they will give you advice and even code if necessary. There are also numerous Facebook and Reddit groups and forums where you can ask questions of the Elementor community. Agencies, studios, developers, and designers who live and breathe Elementor are plentiful if you need to engage with them for additional support and customization.

Builder Plus Hosting Option

Elementor is very affordable. You can choose to pay for the builder and host on Elementor's own hosting, or just to pay for the builder without hosting.

• With hosting, you pay $99 per site per year and also get the website builder with no hidden fees or renewal increases.
• Without hosting, you have the following choices:
• The Essential Plan costs $49/year for a single website, premium support, website kits, and all Elementor Pro features.
• The Expert Plan costs $199/year and you get up to 25 website activations, plus being featured as an Elementor Expert.
• The Studio Plan costs $299 for the first year, with 100 website activations and VIP support. The Studio Plan is discounted 40% in the first year, after which it increases to $418.60/year.
• The Agency Plan, which costs $999/year with up to 1,000 activations.
• Note - if you need more than one website activation but less than 25 as with the Expert Plan, you can also get three Elementor Pro website activations for $99. All purchases come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Excellent For More Experienced Users

While Elementor and Elegant Themes are nearly indistinguishable in terms of functionality, versatility, sheer power, and advanced features they offer to all types of website owners and professionals, we did find Elementor to be slightly more complicated. Some users new to designing their own sites from scratch or with Elementor's templates will struggle a bit more with the less intuitive user interface and having to add custom code to achieve the same results as Divi users can. Additionally, the pricing plans for Elementor were a bit more complicated and limited than with Elegant Themes. So, while we might not give Elementor our highest rating, it's still an excellent product and worth your time to check out.

Template Monster

• Over 20,000 templates for WordPress, HTML, Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and Joomla, and presentations
• Over 140,000 Graphics, 3D assets, video, and audio
• 155 Plugins, modules, and extensions for WordPress, Prestashop, and Magento
• Website maintenance service

Template Monster offers an enormous online catalog of over 250,000 individual assets covering website templates, presentation templates, video and audio assets, and 3D models. You can browse website templates and other assets by multiple categories, by topics, by what's on sale, by which templates have web forms of various kinds, styles, tags, features, colors, ratings, prices, latest updates, and the number of downloads.

Template and theme pricing

Template Monster offers a number of pricing models to fit your needs.

• Individual pricing. You can purchase individual templates and products for between $5 and $225. Their best-selling WordPress themes range between $29 and $98 individually with up to 17,000 sales for the most popular theme. They include various eye-popping animations and the full complement of pages and post types common to WordPress.
• Lifetime pricing. You can pay $529 for a single lifetime access fee to get everything you need for a website. That includes over 250,000 items, unlimited projects, 1-year product support via live chat, WordPress, CMS, and HTML themes, eCommerce themes, plugins, graphic & design assets, presentation templates, video and audio assets, 3D models, lifetime general assistance, lifetime product license, and lifetime access.
• Annual pricing. If you don't need lifetime access, general assistance, or product licenses, you can simply pay $159/year ($13.25/month). And if you don't need WordPress, CMS, eCommerce, and HTML themes, plugins, or lifetime access, you can just pay $89/year ($7.40/month).

Payment is made through secure and trusted payment methods, and you can unsubscribe from any plan at any time. The support options include tickets, live chat, and advanced support for more complex solutions requiring more time to resolve.

Marketplace for Theme Creators

If you're into creating digital assets like templates, graphics, video, and audio, you can register to sell your products via the MonsterONE catalog.

Customer Reviews Are Very Positive

Customers overwhelmingly like Template Monster and say their favorite things are their great customer service and selection of advanced themes and templates. Customers who dislike TemplateMonster had trouble getting refunds for non-delivered assets. They also don't like that some templates are faulty or depend on premium WordPress plugins to operate correctly.

Solid Choice If You Know How Templates Work

If you know what to expect from a website template site and how refunds work on most template sites, you shouldn't have anything to worry about when downloading website templates from Template Monster.

Envato

• Free 7-day trial
• 4,100+ mobile responsive website templates and 2,600+ Retina-ready templates
• Millions of email template, PSD, Sketch, video, music, graphic, photo, font, and presentation assets
• Supports WordPress, Drupal, PrestaShop, Joomla, Shopify, Magento, Unbounce, Muse, Ghost, OpenCart, and Tumblr CMS and eCommerce software
• Unlimited downloads
• Simple commercial licensing
• No contracts, cancel any time

Envato is a popular and ubiquitous marketplace for everything you need to design, build, and launch your next website project. Their catalog boasts over 4,100 mobile responsive website templates, over 2,600 of which are also Retina-ready for high-resolution Mac and iOS displays.

Filtered Search Reveals Useful Combinations

With Envato's filtered search, it's simple to refine your selection process and find combinations of website template features. You can combine a keyword query with four categories (Admin Templates, Email Templates, Site Templates, and Landing Page Templates) and four properties (Responsive, Retina Ready, PSD Files Included, and SKETCH Files Included). From there you can sort by popularity or how recently the website template was added to Envato. However, we did feel like it would also be nice to be able to filter by tags, price, file types (HTML/CSS), and other key attributes.

CMS and Other Asset Support

The CMS software Envato website templates support includes WordPress, Drupal, PrestaShop, Joomla, Shopify, Magento, Unbounce, Muse, Ghost, OpenCart, and Tumblr.

For other asset types, Envato has email templates, PSD files, Sketch files, videos, music, graphics, photos, fonts, and PowerPoints you can search for and download. They also have numerous web design, illustration, code, photography, video, and business tutorials, tips, and resources.

Low Membership-Based Pricing

Membership on Envato starts at $16.50 per month for the Individual Plan or $10.75 per month per member for the Teams Plan. Enterprise pricing is revealed only after contacting Envato to request it. If you're on the fence about buying a full membership, you're welcome to a 7-day free trial where you can download as many assets as you want and cancel at any time.

With an Envato account, each month you'll also receive 12 hand-selected files, fonts, presentations, videos, and other assets.

Licensing Requirements

Licensing of the assets you download is subject to a simple commercial license for all items. That gives you broad commercial rights for all work or personal projects. Each time you download an item, you have rights for a single specified use. Note that you cannot resell, redistribute, or use items in on-demand services.

Great Customer Reviews

Envato customers are mostly happy with their experience with the website overall. They like customer support and how the service saves them time and money. Everything is in a central location and they don't feel the need to go to other providers to find something they're looking for. Others who didn't like Envato complained about customer service, problems with the search algorithm, account issues, lack of support from sellers, and a confusing purchase process for some assets.

Website Templates Made Easy Here

We rate Envato highly due to its popularity, massive selection, quality, and simplified pricing. Their site makes it a breeze to get access to as many website templates and other assets as you'll need for your projects.

Bootstrap Made

• Live demos and free downloads
• Email and member area for support
• Unlimited domains
• Working PHP/AJAX contact form
• SASS/CSS files
• 90 templates

Bootstrap Made is a catalog of website templates just for the Bootstrap website design framework. The Bootstrap framework is a disciplined approach to building and styling websites that takes into account responsive design and tooling for adding dynamic content and messages to websites. Code in Bootstrap website templates is highly organized and customizable even for people who do not create websites professionally.

Categorized Selections

Template categories include Bootstrap versions 4 and 5, business, one page, portfolio, personal, real estate, transportation, construction, blog & magazine, and more. In all, there are 90 individual templates.

Low Licensing Costs

Licensing costs for Bootstrap Made are quite reasonable.

• Free license. The free license lets you use Bootstrap Made website templates for an unlimited number of personal and commercial projects and customize the template files. However, you can't create websites for clients, remove the footer credit link, or get premium support, among other things.
• The Pro Single license is $19 one time and restricts you to 1 website or domain. But it lets you create websites for clients, remove footer credit links, use a PHP/AJAX contact form, get premium support, and access Sass and SCSS files.
• The Pro Unlimited license adds to the Pro Single features the ability to host Bootstrap Made sites on unlimited websites for $39.
• A Full Membership costs $49 for three months and gives full access to all 90 Pro templates. However, no matter which plan you choose, you cannot resell and redistribute them, create a page builder with them, or include them in a CMS.

Basic Email-Based Support

Support comes through a ticket system that sends emails for communication about your case. For everyone else, there's a simple contact form.

Confusing Licensing Restrictions

It's not clear to us how the number of websites and domains is restricted once you have downloaded and modified the templates, nor is it apparent how they would stop free template downloaders from creating websites for clients. Perhaps it's an honors-based system.

Useful But Limited

Bootstrap Made is fine if you're looking for only Bootstrap templates for Bootstrap projects. However, this site is too sparse on templates and some necessary details to fully understand what you're getting with your membership purchase. We don't have enough clarity to fully endorse Bootstrap Made, but it may be useful for your needs.

One Page Love

• Focus on single-page website templates
• Lots of free templates
• Supports multiple builders and CMS softwares
• 15 template categories
• Includes other assets like vector graphics and unique domain names for sale

One Page Love is a website template vendor that specializes in a very specific type of template: single-page websites. In other words, they make templates for websites that only have a home page with the content of all the different sections displayed on that single, long-scrolling page. These types of websites are typically set up as landing pages for restaurants or for single-product offers/services that need relatively little content to describe them. They're also an unconventional, uncomplicated, and artful way to convey messaging.

Supports Popular Website Builders and Tools

One Page Love includes templates for popular builders like Squarespace, Webflow, and Wix as well as lesser-known builders like Carrd, Framer, and Bio Sites. You can browse by builder or by platforms such as Bootstrap, Elementor, Figma, HTML, HubSpot, Shopify, Sketch, Tailwind CSS, and WordPress. You can also browse by 15 individual categories from app to restaurant to no-code templates.

Affordable Pricing for Website Templates

Website templates on One Page Love range from free to about $99. The free templates are mostly for Wix, Squarespace, Carrd, and other builders. One Page Love seems to be a reseller for lots of other vendors of website templates. When you click to buy a non-free template, don't be surprised if you are redirected to a completely different site in another tab.

Website Design Inspiration Guide

An interesting part of the One Page Love website is the "Inspo” section where you can browse for inspiration and references. Each reviewed template includes a set of tags that you can click to narrow down to specific template topics such as websites for music or events.

More Than Just Website Templates

Additional assets on One Page Love include over 230 vector graphics that are typically used as decorative elements on websites. You can choose from categories like "arrows”, "doodles”, "lines”, "circles”, "dividers”, and more.

A resources section includes learning and services resources associated with landing page articles, fundamentals, trends, and tutorials as well as Squarespace resources. There are services that convert Figma/PSD files to Webflow or to Carrd. If you want more landing page tips, you can download an eBook or a "page spice” kit with even more vector elements.

Limited Scope and Utility

One Page Love is fine and affordable for its specialty, which is single-page websites. But if you need website templates for multiple page websites, you won't find much to help you. It would also serve users better if the search engine on the site worked better with simple keyword searches and had more ways to filter and narrow down search results. These are the reasons why we can only give One Page Love an average rating at this time.

Canva

• Searchable/filterable directory of business website templates
• Preview and customizability
• Over 600 templates
• Instant publish to a free subdomain, purchased domain, or existing domain
• Site password protection
• Insights of views in real time or by country or device, traffic, and engagement
• Full creative control over elements, text, styles, images, video, backgrounds, and logo

Canva is a relatively well-known online design tool for anything you can imagine designing. From logos to memes to social media posts to websites, you can start designing from templates or from scratch with thousands of images, fonts, and design elements that you can add and arrange however you like.

Lots of Ready-Made Templates

For website templates, there is a selection of over 600 pre-designed templates that you can start with and change to meet your needs. They are categorized by themes like portfolio, business, resume, wedding, education, artist, restaurant, and more. Within the search results, you can filter down by style, theme, price, and color.

Point-and-Click, Drag-and-Drop Interface

The first time you choose a template to edit, you get a quick tour of how to use Canva's user interface. You can add elements (shapes), upload your own images, add text, insert pre-made styling, and add videos, backgrounds, and charts.

Low-Quality Website Export and Publishing

However, the website templates category doesn't actually produce HTML with CSS and folders of pages and images that you or a developer can download as a .zip file to turn into a website directly. What you're actually getting is either an image file (only PNG or JPG) that represents the design or the ability to publish your web page to a free domain or a purchased domain. Most websites are not successfully designed and launched this way. Plus there is no apparent way to handle critical search engine optimization (SEO) tasks that need to be done before a site goes live. So it's unclear what value Canva is providing with their website templates.

Cost

Canva offers 3 pricing methods for their customers.

• Free for casual users, teachers, and non-profit organizations
• $199.99/year/person for Canva Pro
• $149.90/year for the first 5 people for Canva for Teams

Insights tool

For websites you publish through Canva, there is a minimal Insights tool to see your views (real-time, by country, or by device), traffic, and engagement. You can view this data for 7, 30, or 90 days, or for all time. But, again, successful websites typically use more sophisticated analytics software tools. Canva isn't helping people much with their offerings.

Customer Sentiment Is Low

Reviewers of Canva gave it quite poor ratings despite being as established and well-known as it is among designers and marketers. Most complaints were about customer service and people feeling ripped off with unreceived orders or subscriptions being canceled for no discernible reason. Others had issues with deleted or unintentionally-altered content and design elements. The relatively few users who gave it positive feedback liked the quickness with which they could design something sophisticated.

Great For Many Things, But Not For Website Templates

Canva is not a good choice for users looking to either download templates or publish websites. Minus the issues described in negative reviews, perhaps it does fine in other areas. But if you want quality website templates, Canva is not on the short list.

Creative Market

• Static site UI kits and libraries, Wireframe kits, apps, and landing pages
• WordPress themes
• Support for Canva, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Bootstrap, Joomla, Magento, Drupal, Shopify, OpenCart, Tumblr, Ghost, and HTML/CSS
• Graphics, photos, fonts, add-ons, Figma UI and wireframe kits, and 3D assets
• Curated design examples for inspiration
• Free assets each month worth up to $1,000 with membership

Creative Market is a website template vendor that features WordPress themes, and support for Bootstrap, Joomla, Magento, Drupal, Shopify, OpenCart, Tumblr, Ghost, and static HTML/CSS. It also has a diverse selection of app designs, landing pages, static site UI kits, and wireframe kits made in Figma. And, the site includes graphics, photos, fonts, and add-ons to support whatever type of site you may be building.

Multiple CMS Types and Categories

Depending on the flavor of website template you're after, you can choose WordPress, Bootstrap, and other CMS templates for blogs, business, commerce, photography, portfolio and landing pages, magazines, and nonprofits. There's even a WordPress plugins directory for over 60 helpful premium plugins.

Inspiration Section

If you're looking for design inspiration, Creative Market has a helpful "Get Inspired” section to show you different design approaches for various types of businesses, design trends, and content categories.

Website Template Search Filtering

You can search Creative Market by any keyword or phrase to pull up related assets, and then further filter by multiple categories, price range, file type, software type, and properties of each asset.

Creative Software Tool Add-ons

The Add-ons section of Creative Market contains add-ons, palettes, and brushes for Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, InDesign, Procreate, Affinity, and other software.

Credit-Based Pricing System

Membership is done via a credit system. You can pay utilizing one of the following plans:

• $19.95/per month for 200 download credits
• $29.95 per month for 300 download credits
• $49.95 per month for 500 download credits

With your membership, you also get monthly free assets of varying types valued at up to $1,000.

Customer Feedback Is Inconsistent

Reviews for Creative Market were very mixed, with the bulk of sentiment in negative territory. Lots of people complained about customer service, outdated free assets, poor-quality art, dissatisfaction with the membership structure based on download credits, and the company not honoring credits when making purchases. Asset authors on the service dislike revised commission rates that reduced their income significantly from what was promised at signup.

The lesser number of people who like Creative Market have the opposite opinion about the quality of the creative assets and the customer service and say they like what they are downloading and what they pay for their templates and assets.

Choose A Different Website Template Platform

Given the bulk of negative reviews about Creative Market, if you're looking for up-to-date website templates and other assets, it's probably best to look elsewhere. Creative Market just isn't so creative anymore.

Templates

• Over 12,900 web templates
• Over 3,800 CMS templates
• Over 3,300 eCommerce templates
• 18 categories

Templates leaves much to be desired in its overall user experience of browsing and purchasing website templates. The website seems to not be under the proper care of a website team that understands the need to eat one's own dog food (or drink one's own champagne) by making the site more user-friendly. That made us immediately suspect that all would not be well with the templates they sell. We recommend you not consider Templates as a serious option when looking for website templates.

Clumsy User Interface and Checkout System

Templates has a rather clunky browsing and purchase process that relies on multiple tabs opening in the browser to be able to view the live demos. This is confusing when you're browsing multiple template options and puts an extra burden on you to keep track of all the different options available across multiple tabs. It also slows down your computer the more tabs you have open as you shop for different templates.

Hidden Pricing Information

Pricing is only discoverable when you view an individual template product. After adding an item to the cart and then emptying the cart, there's no easy way to get back to the home page other than closing the tab and going back to the original home page tab. The usual method of clicking on the Templates site logo to return was thwarted by the fact that it isn't linked.

Broken Demo Pages and Screenshots

Some live demo pages wouldn't load properly or at all, and some thumbnail screenshot images were blank when browsing the grid of template products in the catalog.

Poor Mobile Responsive Layouts

Additionally, mobile responsive templates should not be their own category for a modern website template store. If they were producing and selling quality templates, then all the templates would be responsive to any screen size they're displayed on. Any non-responsive templates simply shouldn't be part of the overall catalog.

Some of the templates we tested were not responsive in very significant ways, such as menu bars not reconfiguring properly for mobile devices and pushing content further down the page with a big blank area just below the menu.

Stay Away From This Service

As a Star Wars stormtrooper would say while under the spell of a Jedi mind trick, Templates is not the website template vendor you're looking for. Move along.

Dream Template

• Low price
• 3,000+ really old, unusable website templates

Dream Template is more of an archaeological site than a website template site. While digging through its rubble, we found a whole catalog of ancient Flash templates that will no longer work in any modern browser. In fact, most operating systems will not allow Flash to run anymore, so even if you downloaded Dream Template's .swf files to try to play them for nostalgia's sake, the files won't load. Not without a special emulator or some creepy piece of spyware you'd have to download from a Russian black market website.

Ancient Technology No Longer Favored By The Browser Gods

Leaving aside the Flash templates, as we reviewed the individual HTML/CSS static website templates, we were similarly unimpressed. The website template designs on Dream Template seem like a scrapbook of GeoCities ripoffs from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Unless you want to build a retro-looking site while painstakingly upgrading the template code to something that will actually display on more modern browsers, there's really nothing worth considering on Dream Template.

Cost

Dream Template costs a one-time fee of $59.95 for unlimited downloads

Annoyingly Nagging Sales Discount Popup

Another annoying feature of Dream Template's website is a popup that appears on every page. No matter how many times you try to dismiss it, it keeps appearing. It offers a discount with a counter displaying the currently-available discount percentage amount, which continues incrementing. It's an apparent desperate attempt to trick the user into clicking the popup in a game of "The Price Is Right” to see how high it will go, and then enter an email that will either go nowhere or will be known by someone likely very untrustworthy. It's a silly gimmick that further cheapens the already cheap-looking offerings they have.

Avoid This Service At All Costs

Dream Template is a nightmare. Avoid this garage sale of a website. There's nothing you need here and you won't be able to resell it for any appreciable value.

Dreamweaver

• HTML/JS
• Micro-site
• Bootstrap
• JavaScript
• Responsive

At first glance, the Dreamweaver website template site has a normal look and feel that one would expect for what it's selling. However, the problems with Dreamweaver only get worse the more you look at it and the deeper you drill into the catalog.

Selling Templates Under False Pretenses

The name "Dreamweaver” is actually a trademark of Adobe. So, initially, we believed that Dreamweaver's templates were directly related to the once-popular Adobe Dreamweaver software that website designers used to use to construct pages for their clients. As we looked further at the offerings, it became confusing that this site has the name "Dreamweaver” while possibly, but not definitely, offering something specific for users of Adobe Dreamweaver software.

In spite of the "Adobe Authorized Affiliate” logo, that brand alignment became increasingly misleading to us as reviewers of the website as we looked for other signs that templates were made in or for Adobe Dreamweaver specifically. It must be very confusing, also, to those who might be thinking they're getting official Adobe Dreamweaver templates when they're not.

Non-Standard Coding, Broken Demos, and Embedded Malware

As we perused the catalog of templates to review them for responsiveness, code that is up to standards, and general aesthetics, we were frequently and unpleasantly surprised to have our anti-malware software warn us of malware. It seems that malware is embedded in several of the live demo pages of the website templates they offer.

Cost

The cost varies depending on the template

404 Not Found Errors In Abundance

Other live demo pages simply don't exist for preview. When we clicked on them, an icon indicating a broken page appeared and informed us that the IP address no longer exists for the website we were being sent to within a frame of the Dreamweaver website.

Worst Option For Website Templates

Definitely avoid purchasing anything from Dreamweaver. You've got numerous reasons to run as fast as you can away from this site and to choose a reliable provider of website templates.