Top templates for building great-looking, customisable sites.
The web abounds with HTML5 templates, and like most things on the internet, they're of varying quality. With so many free options available, you might be wondering why you would pay for an HTML5 template. The reasons to pay for a template can range from showing support for the developer who created the template, to buying ongoing customer support either from the developers or the template warehouse.
In addition, paid templates often have more customisable options than their free counterparts, as well as advanced features such as parallax scrolling and video backgrounds. That said, though, if you know what you're doing and fancy saving a bit of time when building a site, a well-made free template can be just the thing to get you started.
In the end, you'll need to decide what works best for you, your site and your budget. Whatever kind of HTML5 template you're after, you should find what you're looking for here.
Suitable for every sort of business from freelancers up to full-size corporations, Rogan is a powerful and easy-to-use multipurpose template built with Bootstrap 4. It comes with six ready made homepages and over 60 multi-page templates to play with, all of them designed with speed and great responsive looks in mind.
Multiple navigation styles are a useful feature you'll get with XeOne
Price: $7
If you're picky about your nav, then XeOne is a template well worth checking out; it comes with multiple navigation styles, complete with CSS and jQuery animations, so that you can easily build a nav that fits your or your client's identity. It comes with over 30 pre-built pages to get you started, and everything's well-commented and documented, so you shouldn't have any problems adapting a particular design to suit your needs.
Build a distinctive site with this highly customisable template
Price: $17
This is a popular, well-supported and highly flexible template that you can use for just about anything. It contains layouts suitable for many different purposes, and you can use it with WordPress, Drupal, Shopify and more.
Canvas is similar to Porto in that you can use it for just about any purpose, and it's packed with layout options for portfolios, blogs, ecommerce sites and more. It's Bootstrap-based, and there are over 1,000 UI features at your disposal.
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Where do they get these crazy names from? Agmycoo is an isometric agency and portfolio site designed for any kind of creative enterprise, and comes with more than 15 homepage designs as well as portfolio and blog pages – all with plenty of customisation options.
Skrollex is perfect for cranking out web design bangers
Price: $17
For building sites that create an instant impact, Skrollex looks like an excellent bet. It's a single-page responsive parallax template that comes in light and dark styles, and is perfect for portfolio sites, whether you're showcasing images or video.
Created with news, magazine and review sites in mind, Spectr is a responsive template that makes it easy to place your content in the form of information blocks. It comes with seven homepage designs, as well as 10 different post templates and seven blog pages, and also features shop templates.
With over 60 ready-made page templates and more than 400 UI elements and blocks to use, The Future is a template with almost unlimited possibilities. Built on Bootstrap 4, it's fully responsive and parallax, with CSS3 animation and sliders to give users that little bit of extra eye candy. And it's all fully documented for painless building.
Don't like paying for your templates? That's cool, there are some fantastic free HTML5 templates out there. We're particularly taken with this offering from HTML5 Up; it's a responsive design that looks great out of the box, but with loads of potential for customisation, and it's completely free under a Creative Commons licence.
Here's another free option, available under a Creative Commons licence from Templated. It's a business-oriented template that's responsive and comes complete with a sliding menu, and it even features a video banner for that extra bit of visual impact.
Tammy is an independent creative professional, author of Apple Game Frameworks and Technologies, and the maker behind the AdventureGameKit – a custom SpriteKit framework for building point and click adventure games. As an innovative problem solver and industry leader, Tammy enjoys working on projects from content creation – including books, tutorials, videos, and podcasts – to the design and development of cross-platform applications and games. For Creative Bloq, she has written about an array of subjects, including animation, web design and character design.
