I am developing a web-site for a business. A really simple web presence with some Content Management. I am yet to fully convince the Business Owner that a CMS will be so beneficial to customers, but I am already using Joomla for the site, so we have one in place. I used the DocMan extension for Mambo/Joomla to cover document content and access control for the published documents. After some initial headaches with that, I sorted the issues out (to be blogged some other time I suppose) and started looking around the net for free templates. I was after a quick implementation they liked.

After much searching I found the siteground templates on offer for free. You could customise them all you wanted, but you had to leave their copyright and “add” info on the page.

I needed to customise the graphics to include customer information in the header anyway, so I started modifying the logo. Next up was the layout. It was missing some of the joomla inline modules in needed.

Whilst doing this, I noticed that all their templates are just mega tables. Very ugly coding in a standards based world. I am guessing they would not meet XHTML or CSS standards, OK so I checked. The CSS was all good, but the HTML was not Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

What should one do? Write your own template. This is my current goal. I will offer it up for grabs once done.

If anyone has tips on an entirely CSS based joomla theme (aiming at visual design, light on bandwidth) then I would appreciate them.