One of the toughest step of web designing has always been the part where you have to crack your head, thinking of the best concept and presentation for the topic you're doing, and ultimately to get it realized. If you are a perfectionist by nature, simply double up that level of difficulty. Depending on the situation, the difficulty level might increase even further, taking into consideration other unavoidable factors such as client's complex requirements, insufficient supporting materials, lack of time, etc.

Designers are designers for a reason. They're naturally gifted, both in the creative and innovative departments. They can visualize and picture things even before they're physically constructed. Nevertheless, they still do have limitations to the creative ideas which they can generate from time to time. They do need certain point of reference to fuel up their creative banks, as well as to speed up the overall designing process.

Having said that, let us help ourselves by making use of any existing designer's piece of work. One of such areas where you can harvest such ideas is web templates. The main reason why you can generate such unlimited great designing ideas from analyzing web templates is simply because they probably fulfill every single requirements of a typical information database. Web templates don't only come in abundance, but they come beautifully in abundance. If you ask me, web templates provide both quality and quantity for you to squeeze out your creative juices till the final drop, in the most unbelievably efficient manner. In other words, you are indirectly getting the other web designers' work to actually help you with your work without even knowing it. As how everybody likes to put it, more heads are better than one.

Let's assume that you yourself or one of your clients wants you to get a "golf" site done. Through normal instant reflexes, probably you'll get a piece of paper and write down every single idea you can think of. Best color scheme, layout, where should the menu and navigation would be, images, buttons, icons, content placement, usage of flash, logo, how complex it should be, etc. To simplify this idea gathering stage, you can simply get your research engine going by dropping by at your favorite web template websites and search for golf related templates.

Among the search results, you can scan for the best catchy templates and save them in a new folder anywhere in your hard drive. You could try getting around 5 to 10 web template images before stopping completely. Too much ideas aren't really a good thing, hence keeping it strictly to an averagely small number is a pretty good idea. Searching through the web templates using different synonymous keywords can get you to a more diversified set of results.

As obvious as it seems, the choice of saving the preview images is simply based on the "you know when you see one" concept. Even if you're fond of how the curves look like at a certain particular area, save it so that you can harvest its concept later on. If you like the combination of colors, save it. The arrangement of certain icons with the content attracts your attention? Save it. It is simple as that.

Now comes the interesting part. The next step somehow, works pretty close like a jigsaw puzzle - cutting of small areas of the few chosen templates and rearranging them to create a whole brand new design. Take certain parts from various templates, combine them together and do not hesitate to throw in your own ideas to make the final piece a much better one. Once you've formed the complete puzzle, the real construction stage can now begin, recreating the brand new design by throwing in the proper elements for your theme. By end of the day, you've just combined a few great ideas with your own set of ideas, which resulting into an even bigger idea. Who told you that you need to think of brand new ideas from scratch?

If you're into keeping a "design idea database", you can always cut or crop the small unique parts of the web templates you have saved and compile all of them into a single file. This file can act as a great reference point for your future projects should you get pushed into a dead end. Add more ideas into that file as you come across more of unique design ideas. Eventually, you'll get to find that getting ideas is not that a difficult task after all.

With this technique, not only you can save huge amount of time planning your work, but at the same time, you'll be indirectly cutting down the workload of your future designing works without even realizing it. You can work and get the job done faster, think less, improve your work quality and ultimately have more time on other important areas of implementing and maintaining your websites. Try this technique, you'll be surprised how fast you'll get your websites up.