I'm not a big fan of Dreamweaver templates, mostly because the system requires that you update all of your pages each time you make a change to the design. To my mind, this is just asking for problems -- trusting a program to update your pages for you. I use ColdFusion custom tags for my site designs, and since using this method I would never go back to another way of working. The reason I mention it is because there are still a few days left in the open house at Community MX -- all articles are free to read this week. My series on using ColdFusion custom tags to create a site template can be found here as well:

• Using a ColdFusion Custom Tag as a Site Template Part 1
• Using a ColdFusion Custom Tag as a Site Template Part 2
• Using a ColdFusion Custom Tag as a Site Template Part 3

This site was built using that technique, as well as Flash-Remoting.com and EZGram.com. The designs are nothing to speak of (especially this one, which uses a built-in Dreamweaver site design), but the advantage is that I can remove it and put a new design in the site by changing one page. Some people use custom tags in a limited way for footers, menus, and other parts of the site, but to my mind that is not much more advantageous than using a simple include file. To really take advantage of custom tags you should use the start tag, end tag, and optional arguments.

I use a similar system in PHP as well, which I have not written about yet. The system uses a PHP class to hold the site template, but others have written about similar systems.