Forum Moderators: buckworks
Regards,
Tom
Early this week, a customer approached me asking me to produce 30 sites for CAD$30k. I said I couldn't do it- I'm a programmer, not a designer, so haven't been paying much attention to these things. If this should happen again, I'll have an easy way to get money fast. Sweet.
IMO, they're selling great value. Now, does anyone know of a similar outfit that sells XHTML compliant CSS templates? :)
Yes, there are some that are XHTML/CSS compliant, some even specific for particular software like Dreamweaver, and more than likely ODP is the best place to start looking. The best known, best promoted or best ranked may not necessarily give the best selection for an individual need.
There's no way to tell why one company is better known or experiences more growth, part of the answer probably lies in their marketing. And a company's business model or where they get their product isn't necessarily public knowledge - only as much as they want to be known.
A rare combination.
I'd love to resell the same HTML code for $30 a pop all day long, day after day for a year or two.
There are also stock photography sites out there that make deals with photographers for distribution of their photos. That would operate on the same principle.
In addition to big mass-production template sites - and I have seen lovely templates for only $5 each, incidentally - there are some excellent graphic designers out there who make ready-made web sets available for purchase. Those are far more original than most of what's seen out there, and a lot of them use Kagi (and nowadays PayPal) for their payment processing to simplify things.
There are also web designers who offer both custom and template-based sites, with a ready-made selection of styles for potential customers to choose from. One in my area is multi-talented and has an outstanding selection of templates as well as a flair for original design and marketing as well.
A lot of possibilities exist for a business model, and more than likely the chances of eventual success probably depend on the original strengths and strongest selling points of whoever would be looking into it. A high end graphic artist would more likely do well with concentrating on interface design geared to an upper end market rather than mass produced templates, for example.
>>I said I couldn't do it- I'm a programmer, not a designer
danieljean, you could probably contact them telling them that, send them off to shop on their own for templates and then develop the back end for them for sites. $1K each CDN isn't all that much for developing full sites if you look at what goes into the design and approval process and the mechanics of getting content from clients - not even modestly sized static ones with no programming involved.
There are probably countless ways templates can be incorporated into a business model. For straight template sites the market is pretty well saturated; at this point it would likely take a unique approach to capitalize on it.
Alas, I have been undercut so many times in this market, that I'm ready to produce unoriginal sites, without doing SEO or usability testing. I have been undercut by people offering websites for CAD$200!
Especially for sites like restaurants and other local shops, I think templates make a lot of sense- end-users are unlikely to see the same template twice, and IA and usability concerns are similar.
There are probably countless ways templates can be incorporated into a business model.
Spot on. I think I'm going to have more business models to add to the ideas list :)
If you are good at building sites but NOT at design, find a designer to make a deal with!
Design your sites as text, with all proper elements tagged, and hire the designer to "style it". Once the designer learns your code/tag style, styling your pages will be rather simple (and therefore cost effective).
If you go back and forth with your designer every time, you are no better than the client and it will be just as costly -- good for the designer but not you. If you are stable in your coding, each project takes your designer to new levels of efficiency (and lower costs for you) while the costs you charge your client for that design work stays the same. (in other words, more profit for you)
Tom, there are loads of template sites out there that are flourishing. The reason is that there's a need - it isn't always necessary or expedient to have a custom designed site, and templates can be modified.
Could you please recommend several templates sites? I prefer that kind of annual membership sites, where I can download lots of templates.
-Tom
They probably hired a few in house designers for some $500/month (reasonable rate for Russian market). If a designer can make 2 templates per day, that is 60 per month. At a cost of less than 9 dollars. If you consider reselling them, then the cost per template is even less.
tomld2: there are a lot of people selling TM templates illegaly. I've purchased some before not knowing they were TM.
Properly customizing a pre-built template so that it can be scaled around your data is often harder than building a template from scratch. Of course, template buyer's don't know that, so thay buy and learn for themselves.
If you want to learn how to do your own templates, I recommend PV7. Yes they sell templates, but they are really in the education business, and educate their customers about CSS and such so well that you may never need to buy another template.
