I could make a parallel with cars – you get a new model and in a few years time you get a ‘cosmetic’ change. You might get a few other changes if the car is still selling. Only after it’s life cycle cannot be prolonged anymore the company decides to kill it and launch another one in its place.

I think keeping templates might make sense only when doing so is cheaper than not to. Certainly by chosing to keep them we add additional limitation to our designs.

I’d like to believe that with each year there are fewer CMS’s around that would make reusing templates a necessary or even appealing idea.

When it comes to personal experience my decision is made on the current state of the html code – if it’s clean I just change the styles. It’s way faster. On the backend I strive to make blocks as generic as possible to allow this.

You’ll obviously work from existing XHTML templates if your client demands that and I absolutely agree that good templates make such work possible. But that wasn’t my point.

What I wanted to know is if you do it otherwise? Do you look at templates first and try to fit design to it when this isn’t expected of you?

I have a sneaky suspicion that you don’t and that not many people do. And that was my point. There are plenty of reasons to do CSS based designs, but reusing existing templates might not be one of them.

On a big site with a fairly complex CSS it can simply take more time to understand previous design (and that’s work providing little fun) than to whip up your own and I don’t see this changing anytime soon.

Of course, there will always be exceptions.