What templates do you use?
Since I'm not a designer, I always struggle with templating my projects.
I've bought The SaaS , I believe it's from a fellow indie hacker, and I love it. It is very well structured, you have blocks you can reuse, etc.
However, other themes I've bought were not close to this quality even though they are as (or more) expensive. So, what templates do you use for your projects?
I found most themes to be terrible and hard to manage.
After building https://versoly.com/ I can understand why. If you want anything custom the CSS can get complex and then you're adding classes on top of classes.
I tried to keep the custom CSS to a minimum. Makes it harder to design unique looking landing pages, but makes it much easier to have blocks etc.
But I assume you are already using a framework for your templates?
Yeah we use Bootstrap4 as most developers know it and even some marketers :)
Even still templates will add a bunch of bloated CSS on top instead.
None. I switched my site (https://BugJail.com) to purely custom, and it's far from perfect, and currently only hero is unique, but still my bounce rate dropped to half, time on site increased by 300% etc.
The world is so full of cloned looking landing pages that I think it's better to be ugly and different, than pretty and boring!
Indeed, sometimes simplicity works... However, the work of a good designer is easy to appreciate as well
woah! The SaaS has awesome templates. I've had use themeforest in the past projects - they're "OK", lots of choices gets the UI job done.
recently for my site https://www.getdatapipe.com I used wix.com, they have an "OK" templates, mostly drag & drop - had to pay the annual fee though.
I’ve had really good luck with Theme Forest. Although now it’s starting to appear a bit dated, but I have bought a lot of themes on their that eventually turned into production code.
It's hard to tell... Some themes are so convoluted that is hard to use them as templates for websites... Some are just missing elements, for instance they don't specify buttons, or forms, etc...
Anyways, I'll keep looking...
Basically, we try always to create something unique and valuable and not so many designers are currently working on templates. More on design-systems (advanced UI Kits).
You can check:
https://www.antforfigma.com/
https://eva.design/
or even more resources: https://designsystemsrepo.com/tools/