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The doTemplate template builder

From 2008 doTemplate ran a free online editor that built a website template in the browser and exported it as plain HTML or as a WordPress theme. The editor has been retired.

What it did

You picked a layout, then changed the header, the colour scheme, the type and the photography without opening an image editor. What you downloaded was a folder of HTML and CSS that was yours to edit, or a theme you could install in WordPress. At the time that was unusual: the normal route was buying a PSD and converting it to HTML by hand.

Why it is switched off

The editor was a Java application sitting on a rendering stack we no longer run. Rather than leave buttons that fail quietly, we removed them. The template pages themselves are kept — see the Templates section — because they are part of the record of this site, and because the layouts still illustrate how a page is put together.

What doTemplate publishes now

Guides. The same subject, written down instead of automated: how page layouts are built, what modern CSS can do, how to judge a free theme or an image licence before you rely on it, and what actually makes a page fast and readable. Start with Web Design or CSS & Code.