DesignLoad Reviewer's Comments

For the cost of one typical website template you can have a whole year's worth of downloads with “TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award” winning template service DesignLoad.

DesignLoad uses its subscription type services to fulfill your website design needs. A yearly subscription includes unlimited downloads from up to 44 categories. There is no need to buy extra accessories like graphics, clip art or Flash effects; they include everything you need to tailor a template.

DesignLoad is geared towards web designers that customize royalty free templates for resell. DesignLoad does not offer unique rights or custom services like BoxedArt and Template Monster.

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Template Selection:  

DesignLoad offers 1000s of templates to choose from including templates with flash, flash website templates, Photoshop designs and website interfaces and navigators. The standard membership also supports accessory downloads such as flash and Photoshop buttons, flash intros, banner sets, pixel icons, arrows, windows, backgrounds and more.

They offer a wide variety of themes that include everything from agriculture to law to travel. However, their templates are only single paged, but you can download as many as you want, so you can easily alter a template multiple times to create sub pages. Additionally, they add new products to their site daily.

Feature Set:  

DesignLoad is a subscription based service with two packages available, standard and premium. The standard subscription is less than $50/year and allows unlimited downloads from 28 categories. This includes web templates as well as Flash intros, banner sets, Outlook stationary, PowerPoint templates, Flash animations, mouse effects, 3D characters and more. With the templates and accessories you can quickly and easily create unique websites.

For about $100 a year you could join the premium package and download from 44 categories. The categories included with this package are comprised of everything offered in the standard plus full packages (templates with corporate logo items), corporate identity packages, Photoshop and PowerPoint designs with logos as well as PHP Nuke, portal, OS Commerce and menu templates.

Besides templates DesignLoad offers a good collection of corporate items including postcards, stationary, print layout and brochure templates, logo designs, CD covers and business cards with logos.

Their templates are compatible with several editors including Dreamweaver, Frontpage and Homesite, graphics can be modified with Adobe Photoshop 7.0 and flash products can be edited with Macromedia Flash MX.

Ease of Use:  

DesignLoad's site is easy to navigate through and you can quickly search through their templates. Their home page displays their product categories divided into standard and premium products, after you select a product category you can search by theme. However, it would be nice if you could also sort search results by color and style.

Help/Support:  

DesignLoad's customer support includes the standards like email and FAQ. Many of our questions were answered on the FAQ page and our emails were responded to within a day. There is a live chat option, unfortunately it was never active. Every time we tried to use this feature we were directed to email.

Summary:  

DesignLoad offers an extensive collection of flexible templates and a gold mine of extras. With a standard membership you can design as many websites as you want for the price of one template page, making it one of the best services we could find for designers.