looks like that you don't need templates at all?
Then just simply create a templates folder anywhere under your project folder and feed it to the TEMPLATE_DIRS. Fire up your app again and see what it says.
then where is your settings.py reside? and where is your project folder?
By the codes u provided, the template folder is supposed to be a subfolder of the directory that settings.py reside at.
If you don't follow this convention, you can hardcode template path into TEMPATE_DIRS tuple.