Can I buy a £50 template?

[polybeads]

HO HO Bird, my thoughts exactly about the site for £1000 or less but as I have encountered in life there are people that prefere to sell 10 x £3000 = £30k of sales instead of 100 x £1000 = £100k of sales, I dont know why? I guess its just some peoples mentality.

Anyway if anyone cares to post up some impressive links to there actinic work (without prices to keep pinbrook and the mods happy) then please feel free!

[wjcampbe]

Where are all these fisherfolk coming from?

[pinbrook]

HO HO Bird, my thoughts exactly about the site for £1000 or less but as I have encountered in life there are people that prefere to sell 10 x £3000 = £30k of sales instead of 100 x £1000 = £100k of sales, I dont know why? I guess its just some peoples mentality.

The analogy doesn't quite fit here, as you can't sell custom design more than once.

If I were guaranteed to sell 1000 copies of a theme I would sell at a discounted price, however I feel that 20 sales is a more realistic figure. Hence I take my development costs and divide it by what i feel the potential sales are.

[BPJSURF]

Jo,
I agree with your logic, many of us who have been around a long time have seen many low cost providers come and go. The reason they go is simple they add no value to the customer.

Ecommerce is not something you provide on price alone. An ecommerce solution provider helps build a business and the business infrastructure. Building a solid foundation takes time, effort and alot of knowledge gained through expereince.

I dont tally my success based on the number of domains I host or the number of websites I have built, I measure my success by the total sales my cleints acheive on a monthly basis. If I do a good job that number expands as time goes on. And beleive me my cleints appreciate that we take this approach, we have a vested interest in their short and long term success.

When you try to build sites at the lowest cost possiable it benefits no one becuase the cleint does not benefit from all the expereince provider like jo could offer. Jo, myself, who ever is doing the work must make some money and as well we would like the customer to succeed so that they continue to build their ecommerce business. You can not offer the level of expertise needed to succeed at 50 pounds and even at 1000 pounds.

I can tell you this for sure. If you build 100 sites at 1000 pounds each and it costs 1250 pounds to build them you just lost 25,000 pounds. Thats the logic so many low cost providers have used in the past. I would hope that you would listen to some wise old geezers and figure it out for your self.

Brian

[polybeads]

I dont think that most people need a "complete custom theme". I would of thought that a theme that looks professional (seems like none of actinics built in templates are)

Most people will not risk paying £5000 or £10000 or however much the correct amount is for setting up a complete theme if they are just starting out.

They dont know if there products will sell, how many they will sell, how much they will spend on advertising and most importantly how much profit they will make. If there basic theme was a success then I am pretty sure they would upgrade it later on to a more expensive custom theme as there sales and profits grew.

With out upsetting anyone I have seen some actinic sites of people who post on here (not this thread) and there sites are absoloutly terrible, I cant believe anyone would buy even one thing from them! Am I the only person who can see these sites? I am sure if some of these sites had a half decent theme to start with they would get increased sales and would probably want to upgrade later on.

Also can some one explain is a "theme" just colours texts and logos or is it the complete set up of everything so that all that needs to be done would be to enter products???

Anyone care to tell me what the average hourly rate for web designers/ecommerce designers is?

[leehack]

Interesting thread, been a good read, will add my tuppence worth.

5 months ago i had never ever designed a website, had no understanding of HTML whatsoever and Actinic was a word i had never come across.

One of my best mates got ripped off by a developer, who assured him of 1-2k per week in sales, the site made £896 in 16 months. My mate was gutted and lost all faith in ecommerce and set it up in his mind that ecommerce was a myth. This was not nice to see.

I personally love a challenge, so took on the task of doing a brand new site (from scratch) to see what was possible, i was not working at the time. I have read hours and hours of articles, hours and hours of posts on here and 2 months ago my newly designed site went live. Its success has surprised us both, it's 2 months old today and to date we have had in excess of 200 orders - probably a drop in the ocean for some of you i know, but a huge thing for us both.

Point is, if you have a brain, some patience and a never say die attitude, you can do it all yourself. This forum has tremendous help and web resources are vast. If you build it yourself and finally get to the day of go live without having paid a penny out - its an awesome feeling. I've built a fully functioning site at no cost that works and makes money.

Does it look professional? to be honest i have absolutely no idea, thats for customers to decide. In the marketplace it belongs, its a pretty unique look, yet designed from a basic theme with amendments to the templates.

If you work in a structured fashion aware of what you are doing (tips such as keeping the template open in dreamweaver after youve made changes, so you can easily revert if it goes tits up). I read some posts on here about doing somethings such use "div" or "span" tags and i remind myself that i must one day find out what they do lol.

If you think my site looks ok, then i promise you it was started with no knowledge at all and you can do the same. Biggest bonus point by far is i understand how Actinic works mostly and i won't have to pay £400 per day for someone to make changes for me.

Good luck

[I-CC]

Actinic comes with a large number of themes, with the themes having different positionings for navigation buttons (or nav text link menus), side panels and so forth, for which the themes can also have the colour changed within the application without having to resort to any html, just click and select.... This is the idea for Actinic from the beginning, i.e. a shop in a box that pretty much anyone can start an online sale business with, without having to employ the services of a html aware designer...

The main thing to point out with Actinic is has not been developed to make it hard for novices to build damm good sites, it has been developed to enable anyone with a willingness to learn, be able to build pretty much what they want, and this forum is a testamont to that fact in supporting and assisting with this. What it is not though, is a WYSIWYG dreamweaver style drag and drop site building system and it requires a little lateral thinking when it comes to doing some stuff within it and some HTML, but it is not rocket science that is for sure... However, not everyone has the time to DIY an Actinic site into the next best thing since sliced bread, not everyone wants to. Many are happy with the default theme and thinks that is cool and will do for them (nothing wrong with that), which many it does and others want it to do more for which they just dont want to do it themselves or do not know how to or do not want to learn, so get those who do know to do it for them - this is the service.

Developing an Actinic theme is not designing the whole site, as in "content", "sections", "products" and so forth, it is the development of a container package (the look and feel) which is imported into the end users Actinic title and then through the normal usage of the software, adopted through either default template usage or adoption from drop-downs for certain specific to needs layouts.... I have not hear heard of anyone being charged 5 or 10k for the build of a custom bespoke theme for use within Actinic, although the full build of a complete site, including theme, content, section structure, products and all of the settings, along with it being uploaded and working, as in effect a completed site, could easily go the 5 to 10k rate, all dependant on the number of products and the complexity of the products to be built.

Generally, the build of a custom theme alone, you could be looking at anything generally upwards 1k or there abouts, and sometimes a bit more in some cases depending on the design, additions to the site which do not form Actinic functionality and the time scale of its requirement, i.e. want it in 6 or 8 weeks one price, want someone to build it in 3 weeks or so, then it costs more...

A lot of individuals and companies have tried to gain a foothold (shall we call it) in the Actinic template market by offering dirt cheap Actinic custom templates (1 time build and used by the end site operator alone), that may have been custom, but not exactly as professional as the end user might have wanted or the developer says you can not have this particular feature, which is not because it can not be done, but because they do not know how to do it in the Actinic system, - but you get what you pay for and building Actinic themes properly takes a long time and a very deep and long understanding of the software and its methods, but for the best part, they have been and gone as the price charged is not sustainable to live or operate under and then someone else comes onto the scene and tries the same, and so, as many seasoned on this forum will have noticed, it all comes full circle and one or two new developers come on the block offering cheap themes and so it goes on...

This thread was originally all about custom themes being offered cheaply, which would be en-mass, so not a custom theme as discussed above, built to order for a single operators usage, but a custom theme built for multiple users usage, built to a high standard of Actinic functionality and cosmetically nice or to a general end target audience/market, which is different from the normal templates provided as standard in the software (which thousands of site operators earn a very good living from incidentally), to set it apart from the others or to simply de-actinify it, as is the need of many, which for this to be a valid service to those purchasing the end theme, can only be sold (if done responsibly) a limited number of times, and as such, any such builder needs to weight up the factors of how many they have to sell to cover costs, which if it takes a month say to build it, completely killing all paid work during that month, then 2 to 3k would be a reasonable expectation after deducting operating costs, power and the good old tax mans cut on your sales/wage etc, and then decide how many do we think we could sell - answer - maybe 10, for £300 each, maybe 20 so £150 each, maybe 30 so £100 each sale, maybe it sells 50 which might be the max (being responsible) you are willing to sell it, so do we sell it each time for £60 and hope for the best, hmmm, I think not as it may not sell even half a dozen... It is cat and mouse obviously and a business decision/risk, but who ever develops or moves into providing themes ready to download cheaply, needs to be wary that 1 theme may be of interest to some and others will want slight changes to it, others will want major changes to it, a patch might come out for the software which breaks something in the theme, which you then have 3 versions of the same theme which the developer may need to patch, for which that developer may have only sold actually 10 copies of it..

Not trying to be wholly than thou on any of this, just trying to explain that building a fully custom design, be it for 1 time sale to the client ordering it, or for sale en-mass to a set number (sometime over the near future one would hope), takes time within an Actinic system to really build something worth selling.

Sorry if gone on a bit

[pinbrook]

We are going off the original point to this thread, which was to ascertain if there was a market for additional actinic themes.

To define the type of theme I am proposing:

It will encompass both colour and layout. It will allow the purchaser to utilise the actinic colour palette as offered on the Design|Options|colour menu to blend the colour of the site to their existing company logo or colour scheme.

It will offer a clear layout for sections and products, thus some of the actinic templates will be amended.

It will include a few basic SEO features (features have could be built into standard Actinic but aren't). It will include simple additions such as a sitemap link on all pages to circumnavigate the current problems with navigation going through the cgi bin.

It will include individual NQVs so that navigation is the same on all pages.

It will include good site navigation.

It will offer the choice of allowing the purchaser to integrate their own logo, or it will allow the puchaser to use text to type in their company name.

It will do all of these things by using customvars so the whole theme is then editable by the purchaser without having to get their hands dirty learning html

The whole theme will be put together by developers with years of experience of building actinic sites, who will thus build their own expertise and experience into the theme, as demonstrated above with some of the additions mentioned above.

This theme would then be packaged as a theme, to be very easily deployed by the purchaser.

Thus the use of one of these themes will have the benefit of producing a professional look, without a large budget.

In V7 the most popular theme is "Smart" in V6 it was "24/7". The idea of these themes is to offer more choice.

Thus for a guide price of £100-£200 you get a specialist theme for next to no money. This guide price is arrived at by offering it as a non exclusive theme ie the same theme will be sold as many times as there are purchasers. Thus covering development costs. It will be slightly unique to the purchaser is as far as the purchaser can add their own logo and choose their own colours, and the theme will be less widespread that the current "smart" theme as not everyone will want to spend the extra, as they are content with the inbuilt actinic supplied themes.

This is not the same as previous posts which have alluded to costs in the thousands - this sort of price is for one off custom design.

This is my last post in this thread, as it seems my theoretical question to guage demand has turned into a bun fight about how much designers cost.

If I do offer themes it will be at least 6 months before the first one comes off the drawing board, as I will be looking to offer this for V8 sites, but I will need to see what designs Actinic pulls out of the hat before I offer additional ones.

[Jan]

> Cubecart looks good straight out of the box
Actinic can look good as well, I think that this my paper site looks pretty good (www.integratedlabels.co.uk) which is out of the box with a banner from Jo. Only cost was for the banner. I was using a custom theme (design) for this site for a while but took it off because the navigation didn't work as well as the standard themes. The out of the box one is much more sucessful.

Regards,

[george]

I'd rather have a car that needed a t-cut but handled and performed well than...

[george]

"It will include a few basic SEO features (features have could be built into standard Actinic but aren't). It will include simple additions such as a sitemap link on all pages to circumnavigate the current problems with navigation going through the cgi bin.

It will include individual NQVs so that navigation is the same on all pages."


Good spot J, although some would argue that these are basic Actinic `flaws` and should be standard kit.

(Hope Chris and co don't ban me now, lol)

I think folk like familiarity so having the same nav bar sequence for the entire site makes sense.

Back to the topic. Yes, I think many would pay for a theme they wanted but you just have to look through the v7 section to see how folk want bits added on everywhere to their standard theme. Providing support on the theme could be hard work but lucrative if desired.

As a user of the Smart theme I've mentioned before that someone could rip out all the juicy info/tips etc based on the Smart theme alone (hiding sub sections, sidebar boxes work, etc etc) and create a decent mini-guide that would avoid the daily side box question and many others.

Don't suppose I've helped any, lol.

[george]

Thought that I'd add that I think thats a crackin' post (back a little bit) from Lee from the Birmingham Model people, and a very good 'site to boot. I think its good to see posts like this on here (the forum) where folk just don't moan about what Actinic dosen't do.

Good work fella.

[Ho Ho Bird]

Winding up

Well, my first post has been fun & illuminating.

Birmingham model shop does look great, but I'm not sure if I have the time to go through the learning process.

'Integrated labels' site just shows how much better a 'standard' theme can be made with a bit of customisation.

Polybeads - thanks for your suport and direct questionning.

I think Jo at Pinbrook has understood the need very well and I look forward to watching their progress in v8. Jo, are you selling shares in your Co?

I guess therefore we arrive back at the beginning (?) Does anyone know where I can buy a £200 banner design, with idiot proof instructions for uploading?

[polybeads]

http://www.birminghammodelcentre.co.uk

Looks pretty good to me well done leehack, its nice to see an interesting thread on this bbs with plenty of peoples opinions, after all this is probably one of the most posted topics. As soon as someone buys Actinic they start looking for a theme so if there is a thread like this people will add to it

[Nigel Smith]

50 to 100 hours to get a very basic looking site sounds a lot!

You must be joking! I started on my website 2 years ago and it's still not finished, I'm not sure how many hours I've put in but it's possibly over 2000 hours (about 20 hours a week).

When I started I didn't know how to turn a computer on and thought software was something you slept on. Actinic has provided a steep learning curve throughout this period and I'm still learning (and will continue to do so).

I just hope I finish the site before I retire