Your site's appearance is the #1 influence on how credible your product or service is. If your site is struggling to get the results you want because of its appearance, here's a quick and inexpensive solution for you.

There is no excuse not to have a clean, professional looking site. Even if you don't have the big money to spend with a website developer, there are solutions to getting the site that is needed to be successful online.

It used to be that one of the only ways to get a good looking site was to hire someone to do it. It was either that or spend long hours perfecting your skills.

As more people continue to use the internet, professional looking sites are starting to be mass produced for low cost or even free. This is being accomplished in the form of website "templates".

These are the equivalent to instant soup. The site templates are predesigned websites you can use. They give you all of the basic ingredients. You simply add your content and spice it up to your own personal tastes.

Some of the positive things about site templates are:

• Low or even no cost

• You immediately have a very good idea of what the site will look like BEFORE you decide to work on it

• The speed at how quickly you can have the new look up and running

• The benefit of how easy it is to adapt a template to your own desires

Some potential downsides of getting a site template is:

• You run the risk of other sites have the same style as yours (the odds of people coming across yours and a duplicate are pretty slim. Also you can customize yours as much as you want so they won't be exactly the same).

• You don't get the same satisfaction of having created your site from the very beginning.

There are quite a few places online to get site templates. Some free ones worth taking a look at include:

Freesitetemplate Here's some examples of some of the pages available for free:

Samples from freesitetemplates.com - Hundreds are there for the taking

Here is a list of some other Free Site Template websites:

• http://www.elated.com
• http://www.4templates.com
• http://www.imagecafe.com
• http://home.netscape.com/websites
• http://www.webdiner.com/templates/index.htm
• http://www.budgetfreestuff.com/templates.htm

The drawback to free site templates is quality. Since they are free, the designers aren't always committed to putting a lot of work into them. You may have to sort through several pages to find some decent designs you like.

Pay A Little, Get A Lot

If you don't mind paying a little bit of money, you can have a very professional looking site. Some pay-for-template sites such as templatemonster.com allow you to either purchase the basic rights to the site or purchase the master rights to it. The basic rights generally cost under $50.

By buying the master rights, the template will no longer be sold from the template site. These usually run a few hundred dollars. Of course people may have already purchased it prior to you getting it so there may be some copies of it floating around.

Here's some sample sites from templatemonster.com:

Samples from monstertemplates.com - Very professional designs with sharp graphics

As you can see, they are very sharp looking and are tailored to a wide variety of industries. You want to be careful and not get one so overloaded with graphics that it is going to take to long to load.

What To Do With The Template

Once you have the template, you will be given all of the files that go along with your new website. This will include any graphics files.

You can then open up the template file in your favorite html editor and customize it as you see fit. I would definitely try optimizing the graphics files if possible. I have found that the graphics can usually be shrunk down to a much more manageable size then when you first get them from the template site.

Even if you don't go completely with the template that you downloaded, it can offer a very good starting off point. You can then modify it to your hearts content to get the exact look and feel you were looking for.

With the availability of website templates as common as they are now, there really is no excuse not to have a professional looking site for your business. They can make a great starting off point for your online presence.