Brian Goldfarb of the ASP.NET team has asked the question about what master page templates we would like when they ship Whidbey. My first reaction is that templates are really useful when you are starting out fresh and you want a leg-up, generally you would take the master page and add detail to it. But what I really want is a series of very distinct templates – I can slap together a three column template in around thirty seconds – so how much time are you really saving me?
What I would prefer you do is spend that development time engaging a whole bunch of those design firms which produce site layouts on a contract basis. Have thousands of them, in fact, keep building them after the product ships so I can download them and add them to my library.
Get people to tell you what sites they love the look and feel of and reproduce them in a template form. I’d love to get you started, there is a site out there whose look and feel I really love, but I can’t remember what it is (thats a real lot of help I know). If anyone out there reading this can remember what it is that would be fantastic.
Its a recently renovated site with a glassy look and feel. The theme that was being used had a nice evergreen tree sitting up on the header panel and the content area was centered in the middle of the page. It is .NET orientated and is maintained by one of the well known .NET bloggers/guys.