Can I buy a £50 template?

[Ho Ho Bird]

Like I guess thousands of us out there, I want to use Actinic but don't want it to look like Actinic standard templates. I know nothing about html, and have been quoted horrible prices to have it done professionally. I can build my catalogues (sections, products etc etc) but have exhausted all the standard templates and they all look terrible. Why isn't someone selling £50 solutions that get us 'on the road' to looking good? I know (fear) if I buy a $35 template that isn't built for Atinic I'll be no better of. Thanks for any help!

[Duncan Rounding]

Unfortunately, as you have found, a £50 solution couldn't come close to the costs for the work involved to customise the templates. There are hundreds of shops out there using standard templates and many I'm sure doing very well. Making yours look different and having your own identity is of course important, but a lot can be done by just changing the colour scheme and logo etc. and adding images in fragments and the like - more customisation could come later.
I expect the costs to modify Actinic would be substantially lower than having a complete ecommerce solution tailored to your needs (including product management, basket and payment facilities).
Many people have learnt html (on the go as it were) whilst modifying their shop templates.

[pinbrook]

I am considering offering pre-made themes once V8 is released. But as Duncan says the cost involved exceed a potetial sale price of £50.

Another consideration has to be the amount of post sales support that will be inevitable.

I'd be interested to hear peoples opinion on what they are prepared to pay for a theme, withthe following in mind.

Cost for a theme with no support
cost for a theme that is not going to be unique to them
cost of support to ensure sucessful integration by the client (email only)
cost of us installing the theme.

cost to supply tweaks to bend the theme to customer requirement

cost of support further down the line when changes are made to the site, which causes the theme to require changes.

[RuralWeb]

To give people an idea of what designers are charging for a custom shop in my area. I was contacted the other day by a friend who's company wanted to know if £30,000 was a reasonable price to pay for a website, after talking to them the shop that was being offered did nothing Actinic could not do.
But the bit relating to this thread was that this was a basic price if they wanted a template altered it would cost £500 per template. So as Jo says £50 is way below what people should expect to pay. I have seen some stupid prices advertised for Actinic templates and so I do it myself. BUT at the right price I would buy templates, I think the price would obviously need to reflect the complexity but I think:

Cost for a theme with no support - £500
cost for a theme that is not going to be unique to them - £150
cost of support to ensure sucessful integration by the client (email only) - £100
cost of us installing the theme - £200

cost to supply tweaks to bend the theme to customer requirement - £100 per template

cost of support further down the line when changes are made to the site, which causes the theme to require changes - POA

I would use the first two options and charge a client for the rest.

[polybeads]

There are plenty of well skilled people out there that will design sites for much less than some of the crazy prices on here!

i know the set ups slightly different than Actinic but I have seen some very good looking sites cubecart sites with well made logos made for less than £100.

[pinbrook]

A logo is not the same as a theme.

A theme requires multiple images and customised html templates to control layout.

Malcolms price guide is an indication of the value of the work involved.

My thoughts are :

A unique theme without support £500
A non unique theme without support £150

support charged at £25 per email

These are realistic prices, now the million dollar Q is would you pay....

bearing in mind that there is always are difference between what you would like to pay and what you should pay.

[Ho Ho Bird]

Thanks so far

Hi members. Thanks for your thoughts so far.
I'd happily pay the £150 quoted for something off the shelf, non unique that I could copy into the folder I was told to and then load-it up through the normal 'select a theme'. I know when it gets down to it we users all think we are unique but Actinic already provide plenty of themes that cover all the bases apart from looking professional. I'm admiring www.gardengadgets.co.uk and reckon with my photoshop skills I could easily make that 'template' work for me if I just had to swap text, jpegs or gifs, and its in a different league to what is available from Actinic. I'm sure there is a good little earner for one of you developers to build a few modern and professional looking templates and market them as 'Actinic compatable' at £100 or so each. You'd provide a page of upload instructions and access to faq's. Further support would be £20 per email or £1 / minute (or more) help line (£60 per hour not bad!)
If anyone wants me as a trial client I'm available at very reasonable rates myself!

[Jan]

Gary Hay did this for a while, he had several nice themes for sale at around £40, I don't think that it turned out to be a very pofitable or easy task in the end.

Regards,

[pinbrook]

No offence to Gary but his themes weren't very good.... IMO

4Sure also have offered themes in the past, I'm not sure if they have any at the mo though. They placed a max number on the amount of times they would sell a non-unique theme, thus they ran out.

for something off the shelf, non unique that I could copy into the folder I was told to and then load-it up through the normal 'select a theme'.

this is how I would propose to release it

[RuralWeb]

Sounds good to me

[polybeads]

Sorry i should of wrote Logo + Theme.

As I said there are lots of people out there looking for work, I think that there is a bulletin board/auction site that you can put requests on and people will come back to you with prices and what they can offer you.

I would of thought you could easily get something done for no more than £150, I had some work done by a member of staff who worked for a logo company.

Company price £200+ VAT , price for member of staff to do it out of hours and send me a selection of designs £25.

I would of thought most people want a basic theme that they can fit there logo into, and enter the text and descriptions there self. Obviously its much better to keep the price superficially high.

How many man(or woman) hours would be needed to make one of these £500 themes?

[RuralWeb]

If you want a basic theme then Actinic has 150 ish to pick from. Cubecart has 2 skins which looking at your site your designer has used and created a "logo" which has been put in as per every other cubecart site - this is not what Jo is offering.

She is offering a unique "look" for an Actinic store which does take time. I can, as others can, easily knock up an Actinic template based on a clean theme but for a complete unique theme I think £500 is good value.

It may be of interest for people to have a hunt arround and check out what others are charging and post them.

[BPJSURF]

Sure Solutions offers themes prebuilt in Actinic. cost is between 1k and 2k us dollar. I know thats more then the 50 pounds you were discussing but consider the value. Basically you get a completed website built and ready to take orders. The deliver time for a full site is typically less then 2 weeks.

Most important as a mercahnt you know what your getting. The site layouts for Index page, informational page, section pages and product pages are formatted in ths sample design. Navigation, and important useability features are in the templates. We simply modify the colors and change your logo, in some cases we tweak the design. All coded is tested and we make it all work on your hosting.

All pages use the Actinic GUI, this means a merchant contols all aspects of the site after deployed. This includes the home page and all informational pages.

When you compare a prebuilt site to custom development there is no comparision. We have delivered over 45 prebuilts in the past 12 months using version 7 in the US and the UK. In general terms people are very happy with the sites look and feel. We offer five prebuilts which can be viewed here: http://buythisdesign.com

There will be five new designs for version eight available when Actinic moves the version 8 software to production. We will also be releasing a few new add on tools for Actinic. If you dont know who Sure Solutions are, we were the original developer of Paypal payment model for Actinic which is now in Actinic Software as standard and we also built a digital file upload tool.

As far as buying a 50 pound design for Actinic. If its a good graphic and it fits your needs I see no problem buying a graphic. Plan on 40 to 60 hours of development time to move the design into production using Actinic. Possiable more time depending on the product database and informational pages. Buying a graphic is custom work in my opinion. You must implement the actinic framework into the graphic, code test it, and make it all function.

We also consider a select a theme deployment method at a much lower cost as suggested in this thread. Our experience says there is no profit to be made in this type of deployment as the end customer will require changes and this leads to higher costs the a complete prebuilt site.

IF your looking at buying a graphic or if your a developer looking to figure out a way to deploy Actinic sites better faster and more effectively I would suggest you look at our model. We continue to tweak the offering and I am more then happy to share our expereinces with all.

Enjoy

Brian Johnson

[polybeads]

Can anyone point me to an amazing site thats been made for some one?

I wouldnt mind paying £500 if something looked really good, but I havn't yet seen anything. Can anyone post up some examples of there work that has turned out really well?

[Duncan Rounding]

I think this site is particularly good:
http://www.discountcoffee.co.uk