How to cheat at web design?

Been there . buy it ??? :-) It saves lots of time.

@phpMick Hire a designer or buy a template.

Most templates look like websites, my stuff is more like applications.

Pretty sure that hiring someone is not an option. There would never be enough work.

CSS frameworks help but you still need to know HTML or at least a bit of CSS to adjust it. If you find a template that's perfect for your content, great.

Have a search around for frameworks as well. There's others than just Twitter Bootstrap.

One I use: http://semantic-ui.com

@phpMick I meant freelancers as opposed to full-time staff. If it’s web applications, then just use something like Bootstrap. It has plenty of components for creating web application-like layouts.

@phpMick there's templates on Themeforest for "admin" areas.

http://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-templates

If you want custom UI work done, you can hire a freelancer on a per project basis, i've used upwork successfully before if you dont have much budget just state it and see if you get any offers. I didnt bottom out totally, I paid about 500 dollars to a girl in argentina who took about 3 days to turn around and additional few days to polish some stuff up she was more than happy with the cash and I was more than happy with her work and I got my full app UI done.

I'm not the best one when it comes to design. When I realize that my design skills do not match with what is needed for a project, I hire a freelance designer and outsource the design part.

https://wrapbootstrap.com/themes/admin has quite a few admin panel and dashboard type templates which are worth a look.