10 Templates that Solve Problems for Web Developers

Jarel Remick on Nov 27th 2009 with 106 comments

We live in a web centric world right now, and if you haven’t already, you’ll most likely be facing website related dilemma(s). For example, maybe you need an email template to send out your company newsletter(s) but you don’t have the first clue as to how to create one let alone create one that works with all major clients, looks outstanding and is easy to customize and reuse.

Or maybe you need a stylish but functional admin panel for a client whom you’ve just built a complex CMS for, but you aren’t a designer. There are an infinite number of possible problems you could be facing and fortunately, there are solutions.

1. Airmail! – Customizable Email Template

“Airmail is a professionally built and designed custom HTML email template! Perfect for just about anyone – usable for everything from newsletters to eFlyers to whitepapers.”

2. Simpla Admin – Flexible & User Friendly Admin skin

“Simpla Admin is a professional template with a beautiful and user friendly interface. With various smart and intuitive jQuery functions, navigating the interface is a breeze.”

3. CleanMail – Email Template Package – 5 Colors!

“CleanMail is a simple yet sexy email template package with 5 different color schemes!”

4. WordPress Wiki Theme

“If you’re looking for a Knowledge Base or Wiki for your company but don’t want or need a full blown Wiki Application. This is the theme for you. Built with a custom Frequently Asked Questions plugin to help extend the functionality of your web site. The plugin acts as a custom write panel that displays in essence short FAQs below posts in their respective categories. The FAQs are searchable and paginate and are not required.”

5. Marketplace Community WordPress Theme

“Marketplace is a both clean and stylish WordPress theme with the intent and focus on creating a community site for industry news, tutorials, etc. This theme includes many popular built in features seen in today’s industry leading community sites. This themes comes with 5 different color options to choose from.”

6. vCard Professional Portfolio

“This is a professional and clean vCard based on Tim Van Damme’s website. With this design you can use almost any background.”

7. Sleek Server Error Pages

“This is a clean, web 2.0 design for website / server error pages. It is flexible and very easy to customize. It comes with 5 of the most common error pages (404, 403, 401, 500 and 503) but it’s very easy to add more if needed. All text is real text so adding more pages is a breeze, no image editing required.”

8. NEOTERIC—The Ultimate Under Construction Page!

“NEOTERIC is a clean single page ‘Under Construction/Coming Soon’ template in 10 SKINS designed to keep your users up to date on your site’s progress.”

9. Under Construction Page with Twitter & Pie Graph!

“Make sure your visitors know whats going on with this Under construction site template that features a feed of your latest tweets (which can be easily removed if you dont use twitter) and a pie chart that is easy to change to reflect your progress!”

10. Minimo – A minimal one page portfolio theme

“Minimo is a simple and attractive one page portfolio showcase theme. This theme is built using the 960.gs grid system framework, giving it a structured and professional look and features custom designed icons. Included is a form mail script, so the entire site works out of the box, simply add your destination email address.”

Conclusion

When working on projects for your clients, what kinds of templates do you find yourself most in need of? Thanks for reading!

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By Jarel Remick

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

I'm a freelance designer and web developer, an author and reviewer at ThemeForest.net, a writer for the ThemeForest blog and occasionally web.appstorm.net. When I actually manage to get away from the computer, I'm hiking, watching movies or spending time with my girlfriend in sunny Las Vegas. – View my net.tutsplus.com posts here.

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http://www.itsselvam.com Selvam
Essential collection
http://www.000webhost.com/205252.html Hamza Oza
Nice!
http://www.philohermans.com Philo
Nice List! :)
Now 10 PHP applications that solve problems for Web Developers :P

http://twitter.com/mnowluck mnowluck
hahahaha..seconded.. that would be great..

http://www.twitter.com/adrianomelgaco Adriano Melgaço
Nice! Thanks!
http://cashflake.com Andrew
Isn’t this post just an ad for Themeforest?

http://www.marlowenorthcott.com Marlowe Northcott
Exactly what I was just thinking.
w1sh
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh….
(I wonder if someone got paid $150 for that)

http://www.nouveller.com/ Benjamin Reid
If you’re a developer, you should really be solving your own problems not buying a solution. Re-name the post ‘Web designers’.

Colin
That is definitely not correct. If you can save yourself two hours of work by buying one of these templates then you are coming out ahead, unless you make around $7 an hour.
Chris
Because designers buy design solutions and developers solve problems from scratch, right? This doesn’t make any sense.
arnold
Re-name the post ‘Web designers’. Agree
Jarel
Author
Any freelance designer/developer worth his/her salt should know when to buy items like these and when not to. Time is money and items like these can save a lot of time.

Zoran
Yes, i agree… i live in Macedonia (read third world country) and almost every web developer is using code stolen from internet, more than half of them don’t know WHAT jQuery is (They think it’s kind of new JavaScript language), though they are using already done jQuery plugins, most of the templates they are using are also ripped off, most of the designs (about good 90%) from the websites made here are with tables (The terrible thing is that they point out on their portfolios sites that they are up to date with the web standards), websites are full with inline styles and javascripts and on and on… It’s disgusting!!! I used to be very annoyed with stuff like that, but it doesn’t pay off to get annoyed and do nothing about it, so i would rather buy a template that cost 10 to 15 dollars and i will know i didn’t steal it, thus feeling better about myself and i can reuse it. Another good point about it is that i can do websites much faster when i have the design ready even though i will have to do changes to it which is easy if you are familiar with HTML, CSS and jQuery and to finish this long comment, when i have portfolio with 10 designs from themeforest, clients that visit my site will be amazed, cause it will be something that they didn’t see it before, so i support selling cheap templates by all means, cause it’s really helpful, especially for backend developers such as myself, plus there are some cool modern templates that deserve the attention.

Erik
Why reinvent the wheel?

http://www.naghies.ir Behrang
Nice list… i’m a fan of those “Under Construction Page with Twitter”…they are great!
http://www.joaquinrevuelta.com Joaquín Revuelta
Quite useful. It wil save me lots of time :)) Congrats.
http://www.axblue.com Leonardo
Great post!
http://www.ourtuts.com/ Madalin
That`s a great article…thanks!
http://www.forrykt.com/ Johannes
… oh look, it’s all from ThemeForest! Surprise! -.-
http://www.design55.cz design55
Very nice and inspirative
http://www.designfollow.com/ designfollow
great collection
thank you
alan
WTF, funny post. this got nothing to do with solving problems of developers or web designer because if you are one, you are not going to bay other mans work to solve your problems!IF you do so ,then don’t call your self developer or web designer ,it’s a wanna be!

Jarel
Author
lol, that’s a ridiculous idea. Freelance designers and developers solve the problems of others by the work they do, that doesn’t mean all the work they do has to be only theirs and unique.
Time is money, a smart designer or developer knows when and how to save time.

alan
Dude ,theme-forest is more for collectors or your own personal site but not for selling themes that you pay 10-30 $ to your clients >it’s screwing people I’m not like that and I don’t like that.
If you are like that and you wont to save money because money is all you can think about then you are better of with an complete wordpress,joomla or drupal theme.That will save you time!

Commenter
Wait, this got you $150!?!?
I need to write me one of these then.

ShadowAssassin
I must agree here, I am going to submit an article which matches this, and I should get $150
Tutsplus, you have just set your self a very low benchmark, great work =[
*And I thought this was a decent site with decent tutorials*
Worst post I have ever seen on this site, this is just mere advertising of templates and themeforest.
Not impressed.
Jarel
Author
Hey guys, the price of the post was never mentioned. You don’t know what the editor and I have worked out or even if this was something I independently submitted.
@Shadow – If you choose to view it that way then I suppose. Others view it from a positive light as it was meant to be.

ShadowAssassin
Yeha well it doesn’t really help, I mean, from my point of view (The reader), to me, it just looks like your trying to promote other peoples work, I don’t really have any money which I can use, so this article doesn’t really benefit me in anyway.
HOWEVER
If you could show us how to program a website which is HTML strict, and CSS valid, which works in most webbrowsers, I would be most interested to read.
http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
@Shadow – We have numerous tutorials on that exact subject that you’re free to review. :)
I understand that this round-up may not help you specifically, but it can help others.

http://www.jorgeguberte.com Jorge
Sucky post. Doesn’t add any value to the site, and it’s not a tutorial, it’s more like a post made to promote products.

http://tutsvalley.com Slobodan Kustrimovic
It’s not a tutorial, it’s a WEB ROUNDUP as the category says. Do you want good tutorials, they need to pay for them, in order for them to pay for them they need to earn from other sources (like themeforest).
All you guys talking about this post as the worst, promotional, stupid and other things, remember all those cool tutorials on tutsplus, for which they paid $150 each. If you want to learn for free then be nice.
Ingratitude…

http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
Yes – thank you. :)

Zoran
Personally i am very good with PHP, jQuery, HTML, CSS, MySQL and photoshop as well, but i am not very creative to draw a design from scratch, i would, but then i would lose like one week doing that and lots of nerves, so i am ready to pay 10 bucks for a design instead to waste time, anyhow at the end we all want to get paid for our work, let’s be real. Having place like themeforest where you can get templates just makes some things easier and templates are cheap also. I don’t know, this is how i think about it and don’t say i am completely right. Plus i can always customize the template the way i want to and do whatever changes to it. I personally don’t tend to be one of a kind web developer, i just want my clients to be happy at the end and me as well, though i love the web with passion, but pity that doesn’t pay off, it’s a cruel world.
Thank you for this article, i really like the minimo’s colors, it’s quite calming template, good for presentation.

Nio
10 bucks for design? Shame on you!

http://tutsvalley.com Slobodan Kustrimovic
@Nio – Designs can be from $50 (crappy) to $1000 and more(really good ones), at least in my experience, at the end it all depends on the designer. But on themeforest you can buy a great template for $20, because it’s wholesale, you’re not the only one that will buy the design.
Zoran
@Nio, Recently i created big web application with 35 tables in MySQL database, with stored procedures, triggers, views, lots of PHP code that is scraping content from sites and updates the database on given intervals… I had deadline of 4 weeks and i got like 250 to 300 Euros for it plus/minus the expenses, so tell me honestly if you would do it or you would tell the client to shove his offer in…? If you offer to a client here (Macedonia) a design that cost i don’t know about 300 to 500 euros, he would want a blond girl with it, no no, two blond girls and a weekend on Hawaii…
Nio
Zoran, your clients must understand that this things cost money.
And untill there is people making complex and expensive things for such low prices (logo for $50 bucks for example, if you are 18 and you are starting, that is fine) the clients will think that all this is just a game.
The computer do it, you just sit in front of it.
So, bratko makedonec, make them pay!!! ;-).
Zoran
Yes, but i have no other choice… and i can tell by the way you talk that you are a designer and you obviously have respect for what you do, but i cannot simply afford that to myself and i tend to look on the bright side of life always, so it’s an experience to do complex applications, no matter how much i get paid for it, but on the other side it’s fair enough from my side to pay 10 dollars for a good design. Also, i have seen themes for 100 to 500 dollars and they are nothing better than the ones on themeforest, most of them are using tables (which i hate so much) in the design and seem to be very hard to customize and i would never ever pay so much for a web design no matter how it looks like.So if you think your design cost about 500 dollars, then i think my work cost about 1500 dollars, but that’s not the answer to anything.
Btw, thanks for your Macedonian words.. are you Macedonian too or you just used google translate? :)
Nio
I know what you mean, it is good you learn the things, and after that you must find the clients that can efford cood design and code.
Pra pra djado mi e ot makedonia. Ot Kichevo. ;-).
Zoran
Nice and where you are situated now? About the subject, i tend to customize according to the clients and the market here asks for application that works well in the backend, also i could use wordpress for some sites, but its admin panel is in English, so they wouldn’t understand a thing in it, no matter how good is made, so i have to create applications in my language that sometimes knows to be a real pain, but it’s fine for now. Don’t get me wrong about the design, for web i wouldn’t pay much, but if it was design for magazine or some other fancy thing like logo or whatever else, then for sure it would cost lot more than just 10 bucks.
I am from Bitola, but now i live and work in Skopje (the capital).
The way you wrote that you are either in Russia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland or or…?
http://www.zograph-studio.com Nio
Bulgaria;-) Check my URL, you can find my mail and works there!
I do mostly design…
I know what you mean…;-).

Zoran
I apologize for the comment, cause i didn’t mention to whom it was intended, it was for those who say that if you are developer than you will solve your own problems without purchasing theme :)
Roderick
Well, is not that Themeforest is part of the Envato Network or anything.
Oh, wait a second…
Shameless plug guys, but I guess everybody need to eat.

Darren
I guess everyone was thinking exactly what I was thinking. Not very impressed with this post either.

http://wpcrowd.com Alexandru Vornicescu
Very Cool! Thanks!
ThemeForest is full of talented wed designers and developers… A big thanks to them too!!!
Colin
I think this post would’ve been more useful with some case studies and demos of people using these templates to solve actual problems.
http://designsnack.com Justin Scheetz
Great list, thanks for including CleanMail! :)
http://www.jeffadams.co.uk Jeff Adams
First of all being an author over at Theemforest I can vouch for the quality, it’s REALLY hard to get a design approved.
Secondly – having auhored two admin skins I can’t believe mine aren’t on this list :P.
(just kidding these are proper high sellers but if you do want to see mine – http://themeforest.net/user/jeffeatworld/portfolio)
Good post.

ShadowAssassin
May I rip your template for free ^__^
Jk/s
You had an ) on the end of your link.

http://designinformer.com Design Informer
Thanks for sharing these. Airmail looks great!
http://www.websiteperks.com John
Some of you guys/gals are absolutely ridiculous! One plug post and your off the handle with disappointment! Take a minute to think of all the money or headaches you have saved just visiting the more “spectacular FREE posts” these guys provide.
In the end, it’s your choice if you want to purchase a simple template or not! It’s also your choice if you want to read this post or not, so stop complaining!!
Some of these templates will save you time and money as apposed to developing the solution yourself, as mentioned already.

ShadowAssassin
Exactly, the FREE posts on this site are amazing, simply amazing (sometimes I think they should be premium posts), and when an article like this pops up, it lowers the benchmark for posts, if a post like this can get on this site, then pretty much anything can :(

http://ccpmultimedia.com Connor Crosby
Very nice collection!
http://www.akkis.gr akkis
Nice! Thank you :)
http://vector.laroouse.com esranull
very nice post
http://www.booshmedia.co.uk BooshMedia
Good stuff, keep it up
http://www.xemmex.com XemmeX
Hummm! There is few that could be usefull! :)
http://brianswebdesign.com Brian Temecula
I liked the email templates. Not just because they look great, but I learned some stuff about HTML email by looking at the source.

Al
same here, I didn’t learn HTML using tables and I really don’t like or find it easy using them. You do need to use them for the Email templayes tho. Don’t think I will be buying any email templates any time soon because I don’t have any need for one but if that situation changes, I would not hesitate to buy one. same applies to site templates. why reinvent the wheel?
Al

http://brianswebdesign.com Brian Temecula
Actually, I did find that “clean mail” which is the one I used, didn’t work well for me. Google didn’t render some of the styling well, and yahoo rendered most but not all. I use Constant Contact, so I’m just sticking with their templates, which are included in my monthly fee. Never had a problem with one of those templates.

http://natetronn.com Natetronn
I have seen every single one of these over at the forest so, this post doesn’t do me much good. However, if you explained in more detail why you thought each one was a problem solver, over any of the others, that might have justified this post a bit more. Probably it’s your title that isn’t fitting is all. Maybe you should have said “Cool-ness from the Forest” or something like that.
http://www.webke.net/ CyberFox
Great Stuff!
http://http Matt B
Great article. Always good to have a quick reference for email template resources.
http://surforeo.com chris
nice post. thank you
http://matt-bridges.com Matt B
Oops. My website showed up improperly. Trying again…
Althalos
Haha… how come I never had this idea. I could’ve put this together in no time. And it was bound to be accepted, because after all, why would JW deny somebody else to write advertisement for the marketplace of which is head. It will give the article so much more reliability.
http://blazed-designs.com/?ref=ntp Jonathan Yarbor
Wow, gotta buy the Simpla Admin one! Love it!

http://www.jeffadams.co.uk Jeff Adams
Shameless plug – if you liked that you’ll like:
http://themeforest.net/item/silky-admin/70703

http://blazed-designs.com/?ref=ntp Jonathan Yarbor
Cool, but that looks like a pretty similar copy of this.

http://www.ihlastemizlikrobotuauracleanmax.com ihlas temizlik robotu
Wow… thanks for article… i like Simpla Admin… i’ll buy that…
Bjorn Thomson
It’s great to have lists like this. Goes to show that many common tasks that previously clients had to shell out big bucks for design and planning are becoming much more cost effective.
How many days of back and forth would it take with a designer to come up with a web template like this from scratch? The potential for misunderstandings and poor outcomes are greatly reduced if you are already starting with something that works well and looks good.
Our group was looking at paying $1000 for an email template and custom email newsletter. Now, I’m rethinking and wondering if one of these could work, and we could pay maybe $1-200 to have it tweaked to match our look and feel.
This is great news for freelance developers who can approach clients with lower estimates because they don’t have to spend so much on design, and good news for clients who pay a lot of money and spend a lot of time perfecting a design that may or may not actually work for them in the end.
The only person it is bad news for is the designer who has trouble adapting to the times. But there will always be a market for good designers.
http://www.pixelsoul.com pixelsoul
So many whiners here. I need to just stop reading the comments.

http://sffarlenn.net Laneth
Amen to that – I can’t believe people are complaining as badly as they have been…

http://www.furtzdesigns.com Ryan
Hey my under construction with twitter and pie graph is here! :D that explains the sales!
http://ivorpadilla.net iPad
Thanks for the mention of my vCard template Jarel :)
http://blazed-designs.com/?ref=ntp Jonathan Yarbor
Bought AirMail too!
http://www.booshmedia.co.uk BooshMedia
love it, thanks
http://www.lonegrainger.com/ Brandon Grainger
This is going to help quite a bit! Thanks for the great list!
http://www.worldquests.com/wowguide/ wowguide
thanks a lot for the info =)
Stephen Flee
If you are a developer, and by that, I mean a real developer..
You are a fool to not shop around for templates when you are starting a new project.
Want me to create a rock solid, super secure DB driven app with more bells and whistles than you could ever imagine? Got you covered. Want me to open up a blank photoshop page and stare at the screen for hours playing with colors…your money would be better spent with a designer.
Themes are a tool, nothing more – nothing less.
Shout out to JW and all the tuts+ guys for making my life much more tolerable!

http://ivorpadilla.net iPad
+1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
http://www.antistatique.net Marc Friederich
Totally agree ! sentence of the day : “Themes are a tool, nothing more – nothing less.”
http://sffarlenn.net Laneth
I totally agree here, and echo Marc’s sentiments.
I second your shout out to JW and the Tuts+ guys, as well as the entire Envato suite of sites – the entire network is full of useful, quality and fun content.

http://www.sjlwebdesign.co.uk Sam Logan
Great post, some amazing resources here especially the email templates and the Simpla Admin! Thanks for sharing them!
http://blog.stugreenham.com Stu Greenham
Great post especially like the 404 and under construction templates!
The Email templates are always handy!

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10 Templates that Solve Problems for Web Developers

1. Airmail! – Customizable Email Template

2. Simpla Admin – Flexible & User Friendly Admin skin