How to get a good theme for your website

Generally it is not a good idea, to design your own website theme/layout, unless your a professional graphics designer with amazing software.
It’s better to find one of thousands of free templates, and either customise it, or use it as it is.
Here are some free theme template sites:

http://www.themesbase.com/
http://www.freewebsitetemplates.com/
http://www.styleshout.com/free-templates.php
http://www.template4all.com/
http://www.openwebdesign.org/
Or you could use a free template creator/customiser. These are really easy to use, and you can create quite nice looking themes with them, some good ones are:

http://cooltemplate.com/
http://kuler.adobe.com
http://www.wpthemegenerator.com/
http://www.colorschemedesigner.com/

Or you could get one made especially for you, obviously you can pay quite a lot for this, you can either get one done through a company which has more chance of being exactly what you want but you do pay for the privilege, or get one done through a freelance, there is a nice list of freelance web designers here:

http://designers.designcrowd.co.uk/web?gclid=CLLCzOyz5q8CFcohfAod31wt0A

There are a few places where you can get one made for free, but the quality will obviously not be as good as a paid for theme, a likely place would be a forum.

You can get some graphics made at our forum here.

Here are some websites where you can get a theme made or buy a premium one:

http://www.templatemonster.com/
http://themeforest.net/
http://www.i3dthemes.com/
http://fiverr.com

Fiverr.com is an excellent place to get absolutely anything, for just $5 (£3), you can get cheap themes there, aswell as logos/banners + more.

You can get people to fix, your problems with templates/tweak them, however we recommend that you learn to at least “read” programming languages, for more information check here:

http://youngwebbuilder.com/why-you-should-be-a-programmer

Themes are often seperate, dependant on what platform you are using, for example if your website is built upon wordpress, a wordpress theme will only be used for wordpress. The same with forum themes. You might need to spend a bit of time, tweaking parts of your site, to fit together.

Sometimes it is a good idea to look at your logo colours, for example we have 4, or 3 if you ignore the white. And base your themes around those colours.

Remember, keep your designs consistent! Branding is important, if people can’t recognize you instantly when they see a piece of your content somewhere on the web, then your doing it wrong.