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This article reinforces my opinion that the business of selling templates is a foolish one. 1. The price for templates has been diluted to comical levels. 2.
by skore 13y ago
This article reinforces my opinion that the business of selling templates is a foolish one.
1. The price for templates has been diluted to comical levels.
2. Site design is an integral part that needs proper investment. Clients who invest a double digit budget into the design of their website are clients that you really, really don't want.
3. In most cases, templates are used as a start - since most websites need customization, the templates your sell will quickly become different from what you sold.
4. Likewise, if you pay 20 bucks for a template and then modify it to your site, the quality of the result is often about as good as if you had taken a free one and modified that.
5. The only good business models I've seen around templates are the sites who try to use the "buy in cheaply" model to get clients to something more sensible - where the provider ends up becoming a go-to cornerstone for design.
All this creates a thievish market that is bound to produce exactly the kind of situation we've read about in this blog post: Some people are douchebags who steal, some people are douchebags who whine about it in public.
Sorry, no sympathy. Not a reasonable market. If you set up shop in a hornets nest, expect to get stung.
- radley 13y agoThat's far from true. Many end-users don't need to make significant changes. We've used a few themes successfully. As an Android App developer, we don't even need a website - we just keep one up for our blog and basic product info. 90% of our communication goes through our apps & Gmail.
- skore 13y ago> That's far from true. Many That appears to be a contradiction. Furthermore: I'm a developer for software that is mostly used by people making their own website or by service providers who use software like mine and templates to build websites for clients. So I think the impression I got out of that is a little more precise than your N=1 impression.
- radley 13y agoOr I could just look at the site. One theme sold > 22k copies: http://themeforest.net/item/avada-responsive-multipurpose-theme/2833226 http://themeforest.net/item/avada-responsive-multipurpose-th... You saying 22k-1 were all changed by service providers? Unlikely.
- skore 13y agoWell, I suppose I should quote the page you linked to: > 23 Layered PSD’s for customization I guess at 22k copies, they probably have a good reason to include those. Actually, I can make a pretty good (and I think, educated) guess at what that reason is: Because people have been bugging them about including psd's day in and day out. Trust me, it is very, very rare that I see an untouched template.