andreasviklund.com

I get a lot of questions regarding templates by other designers on the open source template scene, and those questions are often very simple, like "Which template would you recommend" or "How would you rate this template" and so on. I have also got many new friends among the designers, and I find a lot of inspiration from the new templates that they release every now and then. Because of this, I feel that I would like to feature other open source templates than my own in some way - and especially those templates that I think are just amazing. So I asked myself how I could do it, and then I came up with this totally unoriginal idea: Open Source website template reviews!

So how will these reviews work? I don't really know since I haven't written any review yet. But it will most likely be very simple. 2-3 reviewed templates per week, each with a screenshot and a description of the features of the template - and an explaination why I like it. I can perhaps add a few ideas for usage, some example code snippets or modifications that anyone can use if they want to, and of course links to a demo and the download location on either OSWD.org or OpenWebDesign.org depending on where the template was released. I will accept suggestions and requests for reviews from both visitors and designers, but I will only review templates that I think are really good - or that I like for some other reason.

Is this a good idea? Let me know what you think about it, so I know if it is worth the effort or not. "Reviews" may possibly be a bad word to use since I won't be pointing out negative things or judging the templates in any way. I will only check them out and highlight them for different reasons. So maybe "Template highlights" would be better? We'll see, feel free to send me your suggestions and ideas.

Another idea that I got from a website visitor is template "remixes", where I pick a template by another designer and modify it with changes (edited code, new images and so on) into a mix of my own style and the original style. I'm not too sure that I want to do something like that, but I'm posting the idea here to find out what you think about it. Would it be interesting to you? Or do you have any better idea about what I could add to this site? Send me an e-mail or write a comment, your opinion matters!