What are the norms for attribution when it comes to images, videos? The footer. A bar over the bottom of the image. A CC logo. Anything visibly displayed along side the image.
What are the norms of attribution when it comes to website design? The footer, or an About page.
The point is that attribution is made as accessible as possible. It's what keeps the Creative Commons community strong! Deleting the template author's attribution section and relegating it to the SOURCE CODE of the website means that anyone who doesn't know what the source code is (a lot of people) don't know that "hey, this is a template that I can use too!" The attribution is _missing_. It needs to be present with the work, i.e. the web page, and hey, how do you do that? You put the link in the footer, where it was before you deleted it.