Hello,

I'm having some trouble deciding the best route to take here. I want my website, forums, blog, and shopping cart to share the same design so that my entire site looks like its the same place. The problem is that I don't know enough about designing a forum, blog, or cart style to even attempt it and even if it was just a matter of css I don't think I know enough about it to make all the different styles.

What I've been doing in the past is hacking up the different styles and trying to get them all to look the same. The problem is I spend months trying to learn how to edit the styles for each page of the site and if I get them to all look the same I'm stuck with 3 different peoples copy right links all over my site.

Other than that it works and it gets me the look I want across the site but it feels wrong. My site is not about design at all and I'm not trying to display anything I created but I can't shake that wrong feeling I get from using someone else's stuff and I feel like it makes your site look like a joke if you have someone else's copy rights posted all over it.

What are your thoughts on it?

Is it important for a site to have a clear design all the way across or is it cool to have 4 different designs on the same site?

Should I even feel like its wrong to use someone elses design? I know that's why people design and sell their work but I guess I have a strong part of me that wants it to be my own work. I don't know where I get it from but I think it has a lot to do with sites like monster templates or template warehouse that have thousands of sites. Yea some of them are great and much better than anything I could do but everyone who see it will know I didn't do it yourself.

What do you do to get one design across you site?

I really hate the thought of trying to learn phpbb3, wordpress, and zencart software to a level that I can create styles for them.

Edit/Delete Message

I don't understand. Have you taken over a site from somebody else or do you use some kind of template?

Hi Pandy,

I haven't taken over a site and I'm trying to avoid using a template. Unless by some stroke of luck I can find the same template for a webpage, phpbb3 forums, wordpress, and zencart that I like.

I think what I'm going to do is just bite the bullet and start trying to learn all the different software's.

Do you have any idea what order I should tackle them in?

Oh, now I get it. You want to change the default styling of your forum and shopping cart and so on. I read hastily and didn't realize you dealt with generated pages.

Well good luck. It will be messy. From my limited experience those things are mostly poorly written HTML and CSS wise. It can be pure hell.

If it's any help, we didn't try to make forums.htmlhelp.com match www.htmlhelp.com exactly. Yes, they use the same logo, and similar color schemes, but the forum does look different from the main site. I'm familiar with other sites that do the same thing when they have separate forums, galleries, etc. They configure all the systems to use the same color schemes, and to use the same logo, but they don't worry about making all the sections match each other exactly.

I think this is okay for sections of your site that are somehow logically separate from the rest. Sure, it would look better if the designs were integrated more tightly, but that can be a lot of work. If you've got the time, then go for it. Your site will look more professional.

But that's because you are lazy!

I'm joking. I know what it takes and it's no fun. The worst is that when you have rewritten the templates, made better use of classes and IDs and so on, then the next major version of the software comes out you have to start all over again.

Wow that a scary thought. I didn't think of that.

This will be you!

I'm playing around with Drupal. I'm not really sure how it works but it sounds like a better way to do what I want. It has a blog, shopping cart, forums, and all the content pages I could use built in and everything uses the same style.

What do you guys think about it?

I've been using Drupal for almost two years. It is very flexible and powerful, but also complex and not very easy to learn. It produces semantically correct and valid code, and I haven't found that software updates break my layout templates or styles. And I've been successful adapting my templates and styles for use on other sites which use different underlying technology.