Making your own Xsitepro templates should not be out of reach for most web masters. Even for those who consider web design and web page aesthetic pleasures beyond them, can with time, learn how to develop their own free Xsitepro templates.

The question is, why would you want to make your own template when there are plenty of ready built templates available to buy? Thats an easy question to answer, the simple truth is, because you can. Theres also a great deal of satisfaction to be had from building and designing your own web site from scratch. Of course, as the saying goes, even the best designed web sites are useless if nobody knows theyre there. That in a nut shell is why people prefer to use templates, it saves time. It allows them to concentrate on the very important task of driving traffic and marketing their site.

There are of course lots of free Xsitepro templates available out of the box when you purchase Xsitepro, Ive also no doubt that this number will grow as the popularity of the product increases, allowing them to invest more in these type of areas. However, if youre still keen to build your own Xsitepro templates, then follow the advice below:

The out of the box Xsitepro template includes a header panel, left and right panel, a footer panel and the main panel. You can affect each of these areas of the page with your template and create your web site around this design.

So your original design must take into consideration this layout. If indeed this is the layout you would like to use. There are different ways to design a web page, however this is commonly agreed as the best method for SEO purposes.

Once you have an idea in your head of what the template looks like, it is then possible to begin your design. Effectively, what we are aiming to do is to create an impression of what you would like your web site to look like if it did not have any content. This is the bear bones of your web site.

A popular tool used for creating web site templates is Photoshop. You simply select the size of the canvas and start your design. If this is your first time creating an Xsitepro template, keep it simple. Youll get better and more confident with time. Start with the header, there are lots of tutorials that can be used for creating a header with Photoship. I would recommend you study the following:

http://www.pegaweb.com/tutorials/web-page-header/web-page-header-1.htm

http://www.entheosweb.com/photoshop/header.asp

Then move onto the side panels, making sure that they match the header before completing your new web site footer. Depending on your artistic skills and confidence with Photoshop, this can take as little as five minutes for a basic design or several hours for a more complicated one.

By this stage, you should have a general feel for how to create a website layout. To make it into an Xsitepro template, we just need to cut and slice your design. The slicing tool is part of the Photoshop feature set, again with confidence you will be able to use it quickly and easily. However, for a simple tutorial I would recommend:

http://www.eyesondesign.net/pshop/slicing/images.htm

To fit in with Xsitepro, you should have one thought on the height and width of your slices. The most popular of which are listed below:

Header - 160 x 700 pixels
Left and right panels - 65 x 185 pixels
Main body - 65 x 500
Footer - 60 x 130

As you progress, experiment with these sizes to find which suits you better.

Now that you have designed and sliced your template, it is time to import your design into Xsitepro. Like most features of Xsitepro, this is very easy and intuitive. You simple, create a new project and new web site and then click the page layout option. From this page, you have the option to affect the different parts that make up your page (Remember the header, left and right panels etc), it is from this page that you can change the default header GIF, for your newly designed header GIF. You can do this for all of the other elements of the page.

There you have it, youve now created your own unique free Xsitepro template.