I have no doubt, as I begin to pen this article, that it will draw criticism. After all, the stated aim of Templates.net is to help you to find and make use of the right template at the best price, and there's no denying that - as the old saying goes - free is a very good price.

So, before I set out my argument as to why you should almost certainly avoid free templates, and even possibly avoid many cheap templates, let's quickly review the types of templates that are available:

1. Premium Templates
   Sold by such providers as Template Monster, Design Galaxy, Best Templates and Liquid 2D, premium templates are individually downloaded and tend to cost between $40 and $70. Although tastes of course differ and not all premium templates will impress everyone, the vast majority of them are very good designs, and the most expensive (typically $60 to $100+) are of exceptionally high quality.
   
   
2. Cheap Templates
   Broadly speaking, the cheap template sites fall into two categories:
   
   • Subscription sites: Pioneered by Boxed Art, who have recently found significant competition in the form of Design Load, the subscription sites give you access to an entire collection of quality templates for about the same annual price as a single premium template.
   • Budget template sites: Sites such as Templates Resource and Basic Templates have carved out a niche for themselves by selling simple designs at prices as low as $5 each.
   
   
3. Free Templates
   The internet is awash with sites offering free template downloads. The vast majority are awful - simplistic, badly laid out with crass color schemes and amateur graphics, but a few, such as 4Layouts.com and FreeWebTemplates.com contain some usable designs. And occasionally, just occasionally, some free templates appear that are actually quite good.
   
   

So, there is certainly a wide degree of choice. And we would agree that the existence of so many options helps keep prices down, which serves you, the consumer. You can pay nothing or over $100, as you please!

But two obvious questions arise:

1. If good free templates are available, albeit in limited quantities, why does anyone pay for templates?
2. If the subscription sites' templates are of a high quality, how do the premium template sites compete?

The answers to these two questions will make my argument for me. They hinge not around the idea of the quality of the template designs, but the exclusivity. Here goes:

1. If good free templates are available, albeit in limited quantities, why does anyone pay for templates?
   
   Aside from the issue of how time-consuming it is to find the few good free templates, the fact is that plenty of people find them. Hundreds of people, in fact. Or even thousands. The good free templates, when they appear, generate a feeding frenzy! If you look at the "Number of downloads" figures on some of the more popular free template sites you will often see numbers well into the mid or even high four figures!
   
   Now, by no means all of those downloads will result in a website being made from the design, but a significant number will. And therein lies the key reason why no serious developer would consider using a free template: it's going to appear on perhaps hundreds of unrelated sites. Many of these will be of dubious quality and some might even contain questionable or even illegal content. Nobody who is serious about their business is going to take such a significant risk of being wrongly associated with such a site.
   
   
2. If the subscription sites' templates are of a high quality, how do the premium template sites compete?
   
   On the issue of exclusivity, once again. While very few of the operators of the sites containing the above-mentioned questionable or illegal content will even pay the $40 or $50 to join Boxed Art or Design Load, thousands of serious but smaller developers will. They are, after all, very polished designs, in some cases just as good as top premium designs and the price is undeniably appealing. But as all of these sites' templates are available to all their members the downside of using them immediately presents itself: they are by no means exclusive.
   
   The premium template sites, on the other hand (Template Monster, Design Galaxy etc) charge enough for each template that it means that only serious developers will buy it. The number of downloads is usually in the single figures, often only one or two. Further, the premium designs are often highly specialized, specific to certain types of businesses, which means that your business will not be wrongly associated with a dubious enterprise. That level of security and exclusivity for what is still a remarkably low price ($50-$60) is very appealing to many businesses.

Now, while those two answers should have wrapped the issue up, I don't expect this article to put the free template sites out of business overnight! The appeal of the word free will remain just as it has always been! But if any of the foregoing was contentious, this last paragraph might even risk offence. So be it.

The most important question we would ask anyone considering using a free template is this: Why? Why do you want a free template? Isn't your site going to earn you $50? Is your site so unimportant, or are you so unsure of your business model, that it isn't worth $50 or so? If the honest answer to that last question is yes, then you're wasting your time; don't build the site.