Login

09-01-2012, 04:38 PM

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
Marketing guy here,

We're building a CRM app and I'm working with our developer. I'm looking at using an "Admin Template" for our front-end UI, see template here: http://themeforest.net/item/white-label-...kin/270758

Just wondering what back-end folks think about integrating a template like this - vs - building the UI from scratch. I'm sure it depends on how well written the UI is, but just wanted to see if anyone has experienced working with this.

Good / Bad?

09-01-2012, 07:33 PM

[eluser]PhilTem[/eluser]
It heavily depends on how good the chosen template is written (and documented as well). It's always best to have a look at the source code (view source in Firefox) before buying a template. You can be disappointed after your purchase when you look at all the messy code - I made that mistake once, and never do it again Wink

On the other hand, building your own UI has the advantage, that it's really unique - even if you're using something like Bootstrap or Foundation you can make quite unique designs with little effort. However, you need to have an idea of how you want your design to be like: one column, two columns, fluid, fixed, ... And that's always the part where I am bad at which makes me either get some influence from other themes or head over to themeforest and buy a design.
But, be careful with choosing a theme, some look really nice but don't have such cool features like a designed WYSIWYG area, a file manager, a calendar or other stuff that you want in your template and don't want to design it yourself Wink

To sum it up:
I go with themes from themeforest as long as I need a theme. If I'm creating some quick drafts of pages I use pure HTML - and when I say pure I mean pure i.e. just a

Code:
&lt;html&gt;

&lt;head&gt;

  &lt;title&gt;My Test Page&lt;/title&gt;

&lt;/head&gt;

&lt;body&gt;

  <p>Content here</p>

&lt;/body&gt;

&lt;/html&gt;

Hope that helped you a little deciding on whether to buy a theme or create it yourself Wink