Well the structure og dolphin templates and cheetah has not changed over the years and I keep getting message from web designers often chacing work telling me how dated the web site looks. I use Wix for some other web sites  and afew other sources for tempaltes fro me ecommerce site .  I just think the layout is dated  and i agree with them , I know flash has gone  , and I am NOT a developer, but I think if cheetah is to hold its own and compete with what is out there  there is at some point a need to address the template issue

There are some great templates out there, but the Cheetah/Dolphin structure does limit what you can do. I've been very vocal about this over the years because I believe there's an easier way. Smarty Templates (?) came along, but I'm not sure if they can be adapted to Cheetah/Dolphin.

Years ago when I had the ability to think straight I designed a template system that worked great. All I did was give fields a label such as @name, then designed a template where I could insert the labels. So it looked like this:

Name: @name
Address @address

If I remember correctly it was based on Wordstar's Mailmerge and I wrote it in dBII. If that means nothing, you're too young! The thing was, it worked.

Could you be more specific on "modern looking."  Perhaps provide some examples of a "modern looking" template.