Leonard Wass, aka MrLeN from Newzone has finally released three free templates. They

Are written with CSS
Work in all the latest browsers
Are 100% valid html 4.0
Are search engine friendly
Use very little code

and lots of other features…

Besides, MrLeN makes some notes on free web templates available with other providers:

I can’t help but notice that there are a lot of free web template sites online, but in my personal opinion, most of these templates really suck. I think they’re made like this on purpose, so that people will go for the premium templates. So, I’d just like to state that the free templates available here wont suck.

Very ambitious…

Actually, the only ‘special’ about this program is that it is announced… Some benefits of the affiliate program are highlighted for hosting companies and a couple of testimonials from dotster.com and aplus.net.

Check it here.

(Google talk! but do not answer)

- What is a web template?
- web template is a ready- made website design

- What is a website template?
- website template is a pre- made web page without content.

Try out ‘Google Talk‘ project by Douwe Osinga.

Who are the people who are changing the contemporary design landscape? What are the products, organisations and ideas that everyone will be copying in the immediate future?

READ HERE

There are so many resources on CSS…
Well, actually not so many good resources.

There’re two problems. How-to-find a resource (Google is not trusted any more, guess why?) and how-to-define if the resource is good or not.

Andrew Fernandez with his project dezwozhere (which will be launched soon) managed to gather a great collection of the sites related/dedicated to CSS. It seems that with such a directory (well structured and organized, btw) anyone can master CSS.

So go for it!

There’s yet another interview with Joe Gillespie from WPDFD. Though Joe has left the project (and closed it as far as I remember) he hasn’t left the WWW. I remember another interview of his with Web Design Library which caused a discussion on the future of the internet on IWDN forum.

For Joe’s fans here’s the full list of his interviews.

It seems that Template Monster gets back to Google. Though the path is rather slow… yesterday there were no results at all for ‘site:www.templatemonster.com‘. Now there’s a link to Template Monster’s site though the link is not a direct one but an affiliate this is excatly what they call progress, right?

(Template Monster & Google)

There’s an interesting discussion on webmasterworld’s forum on duplicate content. TemplateMonster serves as an example there.
And I‘ve started another thread with dmof but with no special assumptions on the reasons… Tanya from dmof pointed out to another discussion on the case with some interesting versions…

April 1, 2005 Template Monster announced with their affiliates that TemplateMonster.com was banned from Google and it was not a joke at all. Here’s the letter I got on Friday:

We’re contacting you with bad news: our website, www.TemplateMonster.com, has recently been banned by Google search engine.

We have no idea how this could happen, but one of the reasons could be so-called “duplicate content penalty” caused by our ready-made affiliate shops.

The point is that there are thousands of our affiliate shops in the Internet, and 90% of them have the same content and the same direct link to the Template Monster website. So Google could consider that we create numerous sites in order to increase our link popularity and pagerank.

We’re trying to restore our existence in Google, and one of the steps we are taking is to get rid of the unnatural links (including links from affiliate shops).

Thereupon, we ask you to do the following:

Remove the direct link or change it with your affiliate link, or if you don’t know how to do this, simply download the updated affiliate shop from your affiliate account:
https://secure.mytemplatestorage.com/personal/sample-shops/

Thank you for understanding.

Best regards,
Support Team
www.MyTemplateStorage.com

Now the problem is discussed all over the Web… just try Google for ‘Template Monster banned by Google’

Though it was only Template Monster’s assumption that they were banned for creating numerous sites with duplicate content (affiliate shops) now it seems to be the only version as Google still keeps silence on the real reasons.