| A lot of people disagreeing here, but let's face it, people are proving you wrong every day. A generic design can get you a long way at the start. Take Paras' visual website optimizer[1] as an example. Originally built using simpla admin[2], you can still see a screenshot on his blog, it worked well, he's now paid for a designer. Perfectly good when he started out. Craig's list has also been mentioned. There's a DNS service who's name escapes me that's had a god awful design for ages but people rave about their customer service. Design is a differentiator, not a must have. Would Google have won if they'd have got a designer in? The massive caveat is that you need to buy a template that is well written. If you don't you're in for a lot of cleaning up work. That means that you must at least be competent with html to inspect the source or be lucky. To be honest Simpla Admin rocks and that intersection of the right look and quality underlying html/css does take some hunting. Even a brief glance is not enough, one of the themes I bought I ended up spending a few hours rewriting bits of it because the performance sucked due to overuse of cufon and jQuery. I wish I'd spent another 15 minutes checking out the code as I ended up chopping up quite a bit of it. [1] http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/
[2] http://themeforest.net/item/simpla-admin-flexible-user-frien... |