Choosing a Website Template

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• Pixelarity
• Conclusion

Requirements

As I thought about my needs for the HTML template, I came up with the following:

1. It should be generic enough to work with any Jamstack solution that I pick. So, for instance, I didn't want to get a WordPress template of which I had to strip out WordPress-specific stuff.
2. The HTML, CSS, and any supporting JavaScript should be clean and easy to manage.
3. The HTML should be easy to split into reusable components that the Jamstack builder can quickly stitch together to produce the final pages.
4. The design should be cleanly responsive so that it works well on desktop, mobile, and tablet.
5. I would prefer a fairly lightweight design with a simple HTML structure and relatively simple CSS.
6. A simple presentation to the end user is preferred so that the focus of the site can be the blog content. I didn't want the format of the site to distract from what is important, which is the content I am sharing.
7. All common design elements, that you would expect a modern website to have, should be addressed in a style guide or a page that provides examples.
8. I should be able to easily incorporate my personal logo into the template.
9. There should not be any odd licensing restrictions with the template that could cause me issues.
10. If a purchased template, the cost should be reasonable.
11. Having the ability to reach out the the creator of the template would be nice, but not a hard requirement.

Pixelarity

I did a lot of digging around the Internet to try to find a solid HTML template that would meet the above requirements. I admit that I didn't document all the sites I considered, but I do know the site that I chose in the end, that site is named Pixelarity.

At the time of writing, Pixelarity has 91 different templates to choose from, and you can get access to all of them for what I feel is a reasonable price, the following is a short description from their website:

Sign up for just $19 and get three months of unlimited access to all 91 templates, new releases and support. Keep using anything you download even if you decide not to renew.

I played around with a number of their templates and I was pleased with what I saw. Most of the templates generally met all of the requirements from the first section of this blog post, so I decided to go ahead and pay the $19.00 to get access to all of these templates.

Once I completed the purchase, I did more experimenting with a few different templates, but eventually I settled on the "Wide Angle" template. So far I have been very happy with this template, I was able to make all of the needed customizations in a fairly short period of time.

Also, their license seems quite reasonable in regards to the options you have for using the templates.

It needs to be mentioned that the same people who manage Pixelarity also manage another site named HTML5 UP. Templates on HTML5 UP are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and are free.

For what I am doing, I felt that the extra flexibility that I had with the Pixelarity license made it worth paying the $19.00 fee.

I should mention that, during the course of editing the template that I chose, I ended up having some questions for AJ, who is the creator and maintainer of the Pixelarity project. My interactions with AJ were short, yet friendly and informative. So this too was a good experience.

Conclusion

Though I could have developed a new responsive HTML template for my website, I am glad I ended up using an existing template instead of developing my own. I had some personal deadlines to get the blog up-and-running, and I didn't mind spending a little bit of money to help me reach my goals on time.

I am sure that there are a number of other great options for getting a nice responsive HTML website template nowadays. However, in my case, I am very happy with the route that I chose for my blog, and I wanted to share my experience with this stage of the development process.

NOTE: My personal logo was designed by my brother-in-law. He does freelance graphic design work (for a fair price) in his spare time. If you would like him to design a logo for you, please reach out to me on Mastodon or LinkedIn.