You have perhaps already used the templates for the University's web site. Whether or not you use these particular templates is left to the discretion of individual departments and offices. However, the use of some sort of template should be seriously considered by any webmaster who must create a multitude of pages that will have the same basic layout and design. There are many advantages to creating a template. One of these is that the template can be designed by one person in the department with HTML and design training and then used by many people who may not have as much experience creating HTML documents.
Templates can reduce the creation of many web pages to cut and paste.
Another advantage to templates is that they make it very easy to enforce a consistant design among a group of similar pages. Finally, the greatest advantage to creating a template is simply eliminating the need to type in shared information multiple times. I designed a template for the Computer Science Department quite a while ago. Today, the contents of the template need to be updated but this template can still be used as an example. I designed the template as we were in the process of completely overhauling the site.