Brand newbie

It is a wise decision to rely on a template to learn by deconstructing, I agree. But it is important that the template is sufficiently clean, not too wordy and of good consistency to serve as a basis for reflection.

The problem is that it is only when you have acquired a certain degree of hindsight that you can have this critical mind sharp enough to be able to analyze the good and bad approaches, even not recommended, used by the template.

Anyway, here is a good creamery, serious enough https://themeforest.net/

By @B i r n o u

Problem is I see a lot of crap/bloated coding these days and unfortunately it works. Anybody other than a discerning professional, like it or not, doesn't know good from bad. No one gives a flying cluck, beyond devs who take some pride in what they do, how the code is delivered by this or that automated or manually processed so long as it functions in the brower and in reality thats all that matters in cases where someone just wants to knock out a cheap and cheerful website.

Templates are only any good IF you can control the content. When using a template approach its a case of writing content based on the template content rather than writing content for a website. As soon as you start trying to put in a 1000 words when a template has 100 and 60 images when a template has 12 a template doesn't work, it becomes a mess and when you might as well roll you own mess.

Never has a template worked unless the client is prepered to sit down and write/supply the same amount of words/articles, images as what the template shows. I tried for 40+ years with dumb clients who couldnt understand the difference between a square and a rectangle or a circle and an oval or that 100 words doesn't mean 600 words. WOW how I dont miss that!!