Templates, designers, and frameworks om my!

Comment by Bhupesh Shah on December 10, 2009 at 7:56am

1. Do you use professional designers to do the look and feel of your sites? sometimes
2. Do you use off the shelf commercial templates? yes
3. Do you use a template framework? yes
4. Do you use a CSS framework? - yes
5. Do you use Mootools or JQuery? - Both

Looking forward to seeing a summary of the results here!

Comment by Dex Randall on December 10, 2009 at 4:02pm

1. yes
2. yes
3. yes
4. yes
5. both

Comment by Peter Russell on December 10, 2009 at 6:52pm

1. yes
2. yes
3. yes
4. yes
5. both

Comment by Sven Schultschik on December 10, 2009 at 7:32pm

1. No
2. No
3. No
4. No
5. sometimes

Comment by Dean Marshall on December 10, 2009 at 9:10pm

1. Do you use professional designers to do the look and feel of your sites?
If building totally bespoke - yes. Usually no - we customise off the shelf.

2. Do you use off the shelf commercial templates?
Oh yes. Most clients really understand the value offered by a $50 template with a couple of hours of modifications / customisations. Artisteer looks like an interesting option - but I'm not the biggest fan of the php/html/css it generates. For some reason you can (usually) spot an Artisteer templated website from a mile away.

3. Do you use a template framework?
Nope - if we build a new template we hand code from scratch. Seen some frameworks - not convinced of the benefits and query another layer of abstraction, learning and complexity.

4. Do you use a CSS framework?
Again - intrigued by the possibilities - but not sure I like the bloat and restrictions that come from using someone else's framework.

5. Do you use Mootools or JQuery?
Use both - but lean heavily towards jQuery (and always did). I'd like to see Joomla become js library neutral or perhaps even swap out Moo and replace with jQuery. I don't think Mootools is going anywhere and all the momentum seems to be with jQuery.

Just my tuppence (two pence).

Comment by Arlen Walker on December 10, 2009 at 10:28pm

1. Sometimes use a professional designer
2. Never use off-the-shelf templates
3. I use a homebrew template framework I built myself.
4. Nope. CSS is too easy to need a framework. It's just simple math.
5. About 75/25 jQuery/MooTools. Don't usually need all the extras in MooTools, and jQuery is *far* simpler to use and has a whole lot more pre-built plugins. Using MooTools is just too much work for most projects.

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