Reccomendations for New Template

[mbdixon]

Despite being pretty clueless at coding etc I currently run a website for my cricket club : www.marshfieldcricketclub.co.uk using Joomla 2.5. At the end of the season (in just over a months time) hopefully the chap who hosts the site for us will be upgrading to Joomla 3.x. With the upgrade I am hoping to give the site a facelift and would like a recommendation for the best template to use. A site we would like to mimic is http://www.gloscricket.co.uk/ specifically with the photo background, latest news photo slider and with all of the menus placed at the top with perhaps 1 small sidebar. Most importantly it needs to be free and easily customizable for a novice like myself and relatively simple to use for a few novice backend editors.

Looking around I get throughly confused by the vast array thats available!

Thanks in advance

[iextensions]

there are some template sport news or magazine.... you can find and install it.

[kayeshandra85]

Check out themeforest for premium joomla templates

[Femmetreysie]

www.youjoomla.com has a variety of premium joomla templates you could check

[jackrabbit]

You can certainly reformat the Beez and Prostar templates included in the Joomla installation package to be anything you want them to be.

One thing you really should pay attention to is the image file sizes at your website. The banner logo at your site is way too large at 736kb and will cost you in search engine listing.

I took the liberty to reduce the filesize as an example just to show there is no difference in the visual quality. It is significantly less at only 32kb and could even be less if I ran it through the optimizer.

marshall-cricket.png

Are you getting hosting free? There are hosting service which provide free templates for Joomla.

[frankamos]

Go with Themeforest for the best premium templates. They also have really good support compared to other template providers.

[science_editor]

I've had great luck with the Shape5 templates. A large variety of templates and good, quick support.

[jackrabbit]

Trolls don't even bother to read the post. Just looked at the title and jumped right in. The dude's keywords were 'most importantly, it needs to be FREE'

[oakmarklondon]

there are plenty of templates that will do the job. you can look into Joomla 51 Nocturne or Calibre template. There are many color options and you can upload customized background.

[mbdixon]

You can certainly reformat the Beez and Prostar templates included in the Joomla installation package to be anything you want them to be.

One thing you really should pay attention to is the image file sizes at your website. The banner logo at your site is way too large at 736kb and will cost you in search engine listing.

I took the liberty to reduce the filesize as an example just to show there is no difference in the visual quality. It is significantly less at only 32kb and could even be less if I ran it through the optimizer.

marshall-cricket.png

Are you getting hosting free? There are hosting service which provide free templates for Joomla.

Hi Jack Rabbit, Thanks for your tip about the banner. I've replaced it with the smaller image and looks fine. I've added to position 15 rather than the logo as the slider I was using didn't work with the Roksprocket features thing I've installed. Do you know how I can get rid of the two annoying gray lines underneath the banner?

We do get free hosting from a fellow team member who occasionally helps with the site but pretty much just leaves it to me. In your opinion would it be better and easier just to edit the prostar template as I have done with the Beez5 rather than go for something like the PurityIII or Afterburner2 template?

[jackrabbit]

The gray lines are being caused by the padding added by the paragraph tags wrapping the banner image. The header wrapper has an off-white background color so that tiny paragraph padding is exposing that background.

Edit the module for the banner and switch to HTML code view then manually remove the opening and closing <p></p> tags. Also remove the <div> container and the class="caption" that is written within the image tag. You just want the plain image only. Save.

Yes, reformatting the existing template to be what you want will serve you best than to spend hours trying to find something ideal. I've never understood why Joomla's original templates has such illogical names like 'user1' or 'position15'. That drove me nuts! Our templates use position names that clearly defines its location.

[mbdixon]

The gray lines are being caused by the padding added by the paragraph tags wrapping the banner image. The header wrapper has an off-white background color so that tiny paragraph padding is exposing that background.

Edit the module for the banner and switch to HTML code view then manually remove the opening and closing <p></p> tags. Also remove the <div> container and the class="caption" that is written within the image tag. You just want the plain image only. Save.

Yes, reformatting the existing template to be what you want will serve you best than to spend hours trying to find something ideal. I've never understood why Joomla's original templates has such illogical names like 'user1' or 'position15'. That drove me nuts! Our templates use position names that clearly defines its location.

Cheers mate. That did the trick. I was going to run with the PurityIII template when the upgrade takes place but I think I'll stick to reformatting the Prostar one.