As you may know, TemplateMonster is a solid company that does not talk at random being fully responsible for all the tasks assigned. That is the way it was with the website redesign of the Hotel ‘Goldener Baer’ in Vienna. Let’s brush it all up!

You may remember originally published post that cited the worst website designs of world hotels that are actually great. That caused a tide of moot points!

After having censured all those indeed unsuccessful design efforts, we decided to actually do something about it to change the course of the events. In fact, we offered our cost free redesign services to any of those websites that stroke the aforementioned list. The lucky one appeared to be ‘Goldener Baer’ hotel website!

So, we took up the deal, and that was enthralling, we should say. The new version of the website lived up to our expectations.

For now, allow us to remind you of what the initial look of the website we’ve redesigned was:

What we have done is that we completely modified the layout, including graphical design of subpages, coding, and the addition of new sections. And even that was not enough. The structure of the website as well required some functional changes. So, we worked on it a little bit having replenished it with extra texts, added an interactive map to show hotel location on Google Maps, user-friendly navigation menu, and much more. We’ve also added functional blocks that were supposed to be the important links to apply.

And what we have eventually received - there’s a world of difference! Have a look:

That is it! Not so long ago this project was successfully completed. So far as we have enlivened the discounts for Hotels category templates, it is appropriate to mention that supersonic redesign of ours!

Web design has a lot of trends that are constantly changing, the old ones get away, the new ones emerge in an endless process of design evolution. So no wonder that there are endless discussions of web design trends going on and on all over the Internet - even we have published the web design of 2009 trends review. So now we’re after something that’s currently popular. We have even managed to find a couple or reviews of top trends for 2010 done by WebDesignLedger and DesignTutorials4U. These guys have done a great job but we feel like we have a couple of ideas to add.

By the way, all of the trends are illustrated with our own templates’ designs. After all, we do not only talk about trends, we actually follow them. Enjoy!

1. Social Icons

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Trend description: Social network icons are getting bigger and bigger (just as their value grows). Besides, they often get customized according to the general website style.

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Well, folks, the holiday season is upon us, and It’s time to celebrate it all with Thanksgiving bringing in loads of good cheer. This holiday, after all, is one of those joyous events Template Monster celebrates with lots of love and gratitude!

As we all know, Thanksgiving is a word of action. Template Monster therefore offers its thanks and expresses its gratitude in the way special. We decided to present our customers a whole lotta special holiday discounts (the more products you buy the bigger discount you get for your further purchase) and free items (free membership at ProClipart.com giving you the access to the royalty free clip art and IconDemon.com offering Web Icons in case you make more than 8 purchases), to add some zest to our festivities.

This Thanksgiving promo will last during the period from November 1st to November 25th, 2009. Within this time we will count the number of purchases registered for each email address (make sure to use only one email address for all your purchases at TemplateMonster), and according to this number will give out the proper gifts to everyone on November 26th.

Eager to derive more, check out our Thanksgiving Promo Presentation to enrich yourself with some interesting bits of information, related to the occasion.

So, let’s bask in the Thanksgiving spirit getting some really cool gifts from the kind Monster!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ok, here we go with the results of our research - as you know it, in this research we were kindly assisted by our audience. So it appears to be that in our first Halloween research post we were right and wrong at the same time. We were right about the fact that there are not much websites that really pay attention to the Halloween design customizations. Come one, 40 websites or so suggested by thousands of our audience… That’s not as many as we expected.

On the other hand judging from what we have received, there’s more that we were able to find initially. Anyways, it’s good to know that our audience really did help us without making us look like idiots that didn’t see something obvious

Plus, we have already started contacting the participants who’ve been suggesting the customized websites and delivering the prizes to them. In case you didn’t know, the prizes are 10 free unlimited hosting accounts from JustHost, 5 free templates from TemplateMonster as well as significant discounts both from TemplateMonster and JustHost. By the way, we want to address the participants (and the winners) - guys, please allow 2 business days for the prizes to be delivered, ok? No one will be forgotten.

Ok, enough of talking. It’s time for some rating. Please welcome the Top 20!

20. Ehow

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19. Bagolitas

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TemplateMonster is glad to present you a comprehensive tutorial of customization of your website Header for such a majestic holiday as Halloween. With a little help of Adobe Photoshop you can spread some festive mood on your website. Just follow all the steps in this tutorial, written in details by our designers, to create outstanding vivid designs for your website. Here we explain you general techniques of how to customize your header. Following our tutorial step-by-step and using your reach imagination you can produce fascinating designs for your website to give it 100% up-to-date look. So let’s begin!

1. Cleaning the Header

At first you have to remove all the useless elements of your header:

Go to the Layers Panel and select Layers or Layer Sets you would wish to remove and then hit the Delete button;

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