Putting Together a Template

Try as I might to get myself comfortable with the idea, I simply can't publish this site openly with the out of the box set of movable type templates. I really would like to just publish the text of my articles, but something inside me is telling me that I need to put together a set of templates for this site that make sense for what I'm trying to accomplish.

It really doesn't make sense - have a site that talks about all sorts of webmaster things and in process pay no attention to design whatsoever. Not that I have anything against the OOB templates, they are clean, they validate, and they are pretty well thought out - but it does seem to me to be the lazy way out.

So where am I going to get a good template? I'm probably going to end up designing something myself.

It's such a bad decision. Focus on putting together content I keep telling myself - stop thinking about design. It'll take me days or weeks to accomplish something that just won't be any better than the out of the box templates.

Oh well, you can't teach an old dog new habits, I guess.

The first step in putting together a new design - or searching for a template (which I haven't entirely ruled out just yet), is coming up with a reasonable idea of what I want the site to look like. Why is the first step so hard?!? It's a pretty simple thing to ask for...

Strangely, I've found the MT community lacking in a decent offering of templates, most all of them have a bloggish slant to them, and I don't know of any one resource that's better than another.

--editors note:
This evening in fact, I upgraded to MT 3.31 and noticed the StyleCatcher plugin for the first time (apparently it's been available for a while and either it wasn't installed by default or I never noticed it). I changed my styles three or four times and ended up with this. Pretty nifty isn't it? Not bad for out of the box. I also found the BigPapi plugin and wrote an interface to a syntax highlighter that I built last night which I used with my entry about the Definition List tag. I'll probably release it to the general public next week after I smooth things out a bit.

Also, I actually did take a lot of time to release this blog, so I have at least 1 new article for the next 40 days so keep checking back. Some cool stuff is coming up (at least it's cool to me:) ).