Don't stray too far.

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Templates tell us what a web page should look like, but where there's a template, there's sure to be a well-established general conceptual framework as well. I'm not sure who it is who's been studying these things (I've got a hunch that even when it's Jakob Nielsen, he's not the authority our template generators defer to), but somebody has determined that web users never venture deeper than three levels into a web site in order to find the information which interests them, and as a result, the web sites for which that somebody is responsible will not have more than three levels of nesting. Three or four levels may well be enough, but again, that's hardly the point. The point is that no matter how much preliminary mapping out one might do, a dynamic web site is one that is adapting to its ever-changing content. Though the original content may have included only a couple of articles devoted to a topic that could therefore be easily nested within a third-level category, the people responsible for the site may later discover that the contents of that third-level category has ballooned, and that now numerous sub-categories are called for. Content-wise this might make perfect sense, but (it almost goes without saying) additional levels of nesting aren't consistent with what studies have shown us are the maximum levels of nesting possible for good use.

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Go to: But of course you can have a list of sites, or
Go to: Template isn't a dirty word, or
Go to: Doing a lot with very little, or
Go to: Templates from hell.