If you do a quick Google Search for Joomla
templates, you'll turn up a zillion results, and the results will fall into two
classifications: paid templates, or free template. Which is better?
Well, you already know the answer to that: it depends.
Free is a great price, and there are some very good free templates that are available.
However, choose your provider carefully.
Since anyone can post a free template, frequently anyone does.
That means that some templates don't have many module positions, they may
be limited in their ability to customize them, or they're not tested for all browsers.
If you get a free template from a commercial template provider, most offer some
kind of free templates to generate traffic to their Web sites, so you will wind
up with the best quality.
In my mind, it's very much worth paying for a template.
I want good quality, good support, and a minimum of hair pulling while I try
to get it look the way I want.
I've found that many of the paid templates are excellent, and my particular
favorite providers are Joomla Bamboo,
and Joomla Bamboo
is doing quite a bit with responsive design right now, and they have a
very clean kind of look to their templates.
And I've also been a fan of Rocket Theme for many, many years.
These are my two favorites, but there are many other great providers that are out there.
In the end, you need to judge your template by its basic layout. Think about
things like the location of the logo, the primary and secondary navigation
locations, or whether dropdowns are required, how many columns your Web site
design is going to have, versus how many you think you're going to need.
Think about what you need on the homepage. Just because the module has 20
positions definitely does not mean that you need to fill all 20 positions.
Remember that you can also fold the cost of the template, and any extensions
that you might be purchasing, into the cost of doing business, and creating the Web site.
One of thing that I have found to be helpful through the years is when I
provide a price for a Web site, I like to add about 10% of the cost of that
Web site into a little slush fund, as I call it, and I tell my clients that little
fund is available for me to purchase templates, or extensions, and I will
certainly not exceed the cost of that 10%, but I may spend a little bit of money within that pool,
in addition to the cost of the Web site as a whole. That gives you a little bit
of flexibility, so that you have the ability to buy an extension, or buy a
template as required, but you don't have to take that out of the money that
you're being paid for your time to build the Joomla
Web site that your client hired you to do.
Finally, be sure you watch for responsive designs with Joomla! 3.
Joomla
ships with the Twitter Bootstrap framework for building responsive Web sites.
Many template manufacturers are incorporating this into their template designs,
meaning that your template will work on phones, tablets, and desktops.
So you might want to look for responsive design, as opposed to a separate mobile
template, and the responsive designs are less work, there's less to configure,
and you'll have one set of content.
Sometimes with the mobile templates, you wind up with a second set of content, or
a second set of module positions for displaying that mobile template, and that
might not necessarily work out the best for you.