25 top-class website templates

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While using website templates for your website layout might have something of an iffy reputation among web designers and developers, there are plenty of decent examples out there, crafted by some truly smart designers. For creatives without a web design background, and for web professionals alike, these templates provide amazing web design inspiration.

To illustrate the point, we've rounded up some good options that might open your eyes to the possibilities that templates have to offer – at least when they're created by people who know what they're doing. 

These web templates are designed for Bootstrap, HTML5, Adobe Muse, WordPress, Tumblr, Jekyll, Perch, SASS, Statamic and Ghost. At a range of price points (including some for free), there should be a template here that's ideal for your website.

01. Composer (WordPress)

Composer's developers are keen to hear your ideas for new features

Composer's not exactly cheap at $60, but you'll get a lot of use out of it. It spoils you for choice from the off, with over 70 ready-made demo sites for you to go to work with, covering just about every web design possibility, and it makes it easy to create your own layouts from scratch.

It features ultra-responsive layouts and WooCommerce integration, comes complete with some free premium plugins, and the developers are always keen to receive suggestions for new designs and features.

02. Flaunt (Muse)

Flaunt's hover effects will make your Muse sites come alive

If you're keen on cool hover effects but you're using Adobe Muse and finding it a little difficult to implement them, Flaunt may be the answer to your problems. As well as being a simple and fully responsive template, it bypasses Muse's hover effect restrictions with some custom CSS. 

With over 50 slick hover effects for both images and text to choose from, you'll be able to create stand-out Muse sites without difficulty, and at just $16 Flaunt is a bargain buy, too.

03. Definity (Bootstrap)

Definity's modular design makes it easy to play with layouts

A multipurpose single and multi-page template by Ocarine Themes, Definity is built on Bootstrap 3 and comes crammed with stuff. 

It's 100 per cent responsive with cool features such as video backgrounds, hover effects and parallax scrolling, and its modular design makes it easy to move sections of your pages around until you've nailed your layout. Priced at just $29, Definity features multiple website templates and shop layouts.

04. Enfold (WordPress)

Enfold comes with plenty of demos to try out

Designed to be the most user-friendly WordPress theme ever made, Enfold is a versatile and fully responsive theme suitable for business sites, online stores (with WooCommerce support) and portfolios. 

Its drag and drop template builder is just the thing for creating your own layout, but it also comes with a stack of ready-made demos to inspire you. The regular licence will cost you $59, which includes future updates and six months' support.

05. Porto (HTML5)

Porto is available on various platforms

The basic HTML5 version of Porto will cost you just $16 and features a stack of homepage styles as well as unlimited header layouts and a style switcher that enables you to customise your site on the fly. 

It's also available in WordPress, Drupal and Magento flavours, with an additional admin version so you can manage your site much more effectively with a swish dashboard and all the widgets and charts you can eat.

06. Maple (WordPress)

Maple is easy to use and fully responsive

There are six reasons you'll love Maple, say its developers: its bold and unique design; the fact that it's responsive and retina-ready; the way that it features light and dark styles; its parallax header backgrounds; its multi sidebar support; and how super-easy to use it is. 

With 15 layout combinations plus plenty of features and widgets, at $49 it gives you your money's worth.

07. BeTheme (HTML5)

They can't all be zingers, but you can't go far wrong with BeTheme's selection

Why settle for one theme when you can have over 210? Described as the most complete, comprehensive and flexible HTML template for business or personal websites, BeTheme is simply crammed with stuff. 

Fully responsive and retina-ready, with all the parallax and smooth scrolling features you'd expect, it's an absolute monster and the biggest headache it'll cause you is trying to choose from the enormous selection of pre-built sites. For $18 you can't go wrong.

08. NOHO (Muse)

Designed for creatives, NOHO's perfect for portfolios

Designed with creative professionals in mind, NOHO is built to be easy to edit in Adobe Muse, enabling you to get your agency site or portfolio up and running in record time. 

Its templates come in desktop, tablet and mobile flavours and in multiple layouts, and you'll find ample features such as image sliders, parallax scrolling and CSS rollover effects. The results are clean and eye-catching, and it's yours for just $22.

09. Jupiter (WordPress)

Jupiter's not cheap but its output is gloriously fast and lightweight

Jupiter confidently describes itself as the world's fastest and lightest WordPress theme ever, and its latest version been completely reviewed and rewritten to deliver lightning-fast pages that won't thrash your CPU or drain your batter.

It uses GPU rendering to deliver smooth parallax scrolling, it features adaptive image resolution to ensure that pictures look great regardless of devices, and it comes with over 85 templates in case you don't have time to build your own pages with its drag and drop interface. It's not cheap at $59, but the results are worth it.

10. Summer (Ghost)

Summer features parallax blog background covers and author pages

Developer PXThemes specialises in Ghost template and themes, and Summer is one of its most popular offerings. 

For $19 you get a simple and clean template with plenty of options to help your content stand out, including author pages and full screen covers, parallax blog background covers, and Foundation 5 and Disqus integration.

11. Type & Grids (HTML5/Statamic)

This website template offers speed and great typography

Jeremiah Shoaf's seemingly on a mission to free people from complex content management systems, so Type & Grids embraces the notion of the flat-file CMS.

The portfolio and marketing templates are extremely fast, boast a number of variations, and have some very smart typography. They'll work as-is, entirely for free, but Shoaf offers various tiers for pro use, and adds that Type & Grids works nicely with Statamic.

12. Ness (WordPress)

An image-focused website template

A lot of modern themes concentrate on stark minimalism and type, but Ness is far more interested in imagery, aiming for people wanting to rapidly get a photo blog or magazine up and running. 

Priced at $39, it's Retina-ready and mobile-friendly, and in use feels like high-end photo journal app such as Storehouse.

13. Bootstrap (HTML5)

Bootstrap defaults look pretty good in their own right

"Um, hello?", you might be saying, given that Bootstrap's really a framework rather than a template. This is true, but as the examples section showcases, even the Bootstrap defaults look pretty good if you've a design idea in mind that utilises a lot of rich imagery and backgrounds. 

It's just a few tweaks from a beautiful minimal creation – and that's even faster if you peruse Bootswatch's free themes.

Next: more top-class website templates

14. Yuga (Muse)

Yuga boasts six themes and plenty of tutorials to get you started

If you're using Muse and you want plenty of options as well as value for money, look no further than Yuga. Billed as a 6-in-1 creative multipurpose true parallax template, it comes with six themes with plenty of transitions and animation that are easy to implement. 

It has loads of online documentation, including step-by-step editing tutorials, and it's yours for just $25.

15. Halcyon (Tumblr)

A bold and eye-catching website template

Pixel Union is a team of designers dedicated to "reshaping publishing, self-expression and entrepreneurship on the web", which basically means the company creates templates and themes for content management systems. 

Halcyon's one of the team's top-sellers for Tumblr, a bold and eye-catching $49 responsive grid-based effort.

16. Avada (WordPress)

There are tools of tools for refining this WordPress template

Avada ($60) claims to be the best-selling WordPress theme of all, and it certainly has a lot going for it. 

It might be a third-party template, but the underlying framework is flexible enough to enable the crafting of all kinds of design styles, and there are tons of user-friendly tools and options for subsequently fine-tuning the resulting site.

17. Vitality (Bootstrap)

Build a responsive one-page site with this website template

Vitality is billed as a time-saver for anyone wanting to rapidly get a versatile, responsive one-page site live. 

Just $10 gets you the licence, and the template boasts six sample layouts, three page styles, 10 colour schemes, a PHP contact form, and optional full-page image backgrounds and video background headers.

18. Huge (Tumblr)

This website template is perfect for image- or video-heavy blogs

This $19 website template by Precrafted is aimed at people wanting a blog that is heavy in imagery and videos. Many elements can be fully customised, and keyboard navigation makes it easy to quickly jump between posts when using traditional keyboard input. 

The design also includes a fixed (but not distracting) menu and options for controlling how photos appear.

19. Red Cap (HTML5)

Create 'coming soon' landing pages with this niche website template

This one's a single-page HTML5 template, based on Bootstrap, boasting plenty of customisation options and a MailChimp subscription form. 

It's primarily aimed at people wanting to create 'coming soon' landing pages for upcoming projects or products, and for $7 it saves you the hassle of smashing together countdown scripts and the like yourself.

20. Mediator (Jekyll)

A responsive, minimal website template for Jekyll

Another creation that's heavily focused on content, Mediator is a responsive, minimal template for Jekyll by Dirk Fabisch. It's also available for free.

It has support for featured articles, enables the use of header images, and includes FontAwesome, in order that you can easily work with icon fonts.

21. Oblivion Magazine (Tumblr)

With over 100 customisation options, Oblivion Magazine has everything you need

Aimed squarely at journalists and publishers, Oblivion Magazine is a responsive Tumblr template that's crammed with customisation options, features and widgets.

It includes a custom preloader and fancy loading animations, multiple authors, reading time info and SoundCloud player. Made by adraft, it's a steal at $24.

22. Valenti (WordPress)

A website template that's great for magazine-oriented sites

Where Valenti largely succeeds is in its flexibility and richness. This is a template primarily designed for magazine-oriented sites, and it's packed with options for vibrant home pages, full-background image styles, and parallax. 

Priced at $59, it's also high-res- and mobile-ready, provides alternatives for review ratings, and makes it easy to craft mega-menu navigation.

23. Free Minimal Responsive Theme (Perch)

A good foundation on which to build a website in Perch

Perch isn't a product that necessarily lends itself to templates in the traditional sense, but Laura Kalbag created a default some time back, as a starting point. Clift Walker's minimal theme comes from similar thinking, giving you a little extra help to get started. It's a simple, sleek foundation on which to build.

24. Muffin (SASS/Jekyll)

A design-focused frontend website template that comes in four flavours

Richard Bray's Muffin is a design-focused frontend web template that uses SASS, Jekyll and Gulp. Aimed at the reasonably tech-savvy, the template includes colour variables, SASS media queries, HTML includes and SVG icons. 

It comes in four 'flavours' based around the kind of website you want to design, and it's free.

25. Lychee (HTML5)

Lychee has great parallax effects and is also available as a WordPress template

Powered by Twitter's Bootstrap 3 framework, Lychee is designed as a professional portfolio site theme. It produces valid HTML5/CSS3 pages and features over 30 pages, six homepages, 20 portfolio pages and two blog styles, all of them perfectly responsive. 

Excellent parallax effects pair with a clean and professional design, and the whole package will cost you $15. It's also available as a WordPress template.

Related articles:

• Best free WordPress themes
• The best free web fonts
• 50 brilliant design portfolios to inspire you

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